In the News

In regulatory policy, as in life, calculating a potential action’s costs is an important step in determining whether to take that action. Identifying these costs without giving them a place in the decisionmaking, however, would be irrational, and undermines the purpose of calculating the costs in the first place. And yet this is precisely the approach the Department of the Interior (Interior) has taken in analyzing recent proposals to lease public lands and waters for fossil fuel development.

The Federal Trade Commission is accepting public comments on a proposal made by New York University academics on banning so-called “drip pricing” in ticket purchasing. “A ban on hidden fees and drip pricing would represent a huge win for consumers and improve the functioning of markets where the practice has taken root,” said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney with the Institute in an op-ed published by the New York Times last summer. “For the commission’s new majority, which is eager to protect consumers, such a regulation should be a high priority.”

As the Federal Transit Administration and its partners roll out electric transit across the country, the agency should ensure that its Title VI guidelines for funding recipients explicitly require nondiscrimination in the distribution and routing of such clean vehicles. FTA should also implement the appropriate reporting requirements to effectively monitor the distribution of electric vehicles and their air quality benefits. These recommendations are discussed in more detail in our comments to the agency.

The argument made by BOEM at the time was that a decrease in federal oil and gas activity would be replaced by imports from foreign producers, and generally those imports could come from areas with a higher carbon imprint from production. Max Sarinsky, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, told lawmakers that BOEM’s old finding flew in the face of economic principles.

On Thursday, the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources hosted a remote oversight hearing titled, “What More Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Leasing Means for Achieving U.S. Climate Targets.” Witnesses included Policy Integrity's Max Sarinsky. The recording is available here.

To address perceived market concentration across the economy, the FTC under Chair Khan plans to examine how to define “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the FTC Act in an attempt to root out perceived anticompetitive practices. In addition to the proposed Trade Regulation Rule on Commercial Surveillance, the FTC is also actively seeking comment on the following: A petition from the Institute for Policy Integrity asking the FTC to regulate “drip pricing.” The petition describes “drip pricing” as “the practice of advertising only part of a product’s price upfront and revealing additional charges later as consumers go through the buying process.”

A House Natural Resources subcommittee will meet this week to debate the emissions impact of the federal oil and gas program in the Gulf of Mexico. Witnesses include Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Justin Gundlach, senior attorney with the Institute for Project Integrity at New York University, noted that the outcome depends not just on DOE but on “the speed, ambition, and success of parallel efforts by FERC [overseeing wholesale power markets], as well as the state-level politics of specific transmission project proposals.”

“It’s unprecedented for OIRA to strengthen a rule to increase net benefits,” said James Goodwin, a senior analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform. “This is a good thing,” said Richard Revesz, a New York University professor whose name was floated as a potential Biden OIRA administrator. “To the extent OIRA is doing its job, it should push the agency to maximize net benefits. I don’t know if it happens all the time.”

California has been a leader in embedding environmental justice into different parts of its state government, from the Department of Justice to the Air Resources Board. Meredith Hankins, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity who used to work for the Golden State's attorney general's office, said the state is doing work that other states as well as the federal government could learn from. "I think one of the most important developments in environmental justice work generally, and especially in recent years, is the understanding that it really needs to be bottom-up — it can't be top-down," Hankins said. "States and local governments really need to listen to what the communities are saying, rather than coming across with some one-size-fits-all solution that's going to solve environmental racism."