In the News

The White House has chosen a regulatory review chief who has spent decades analyzing the real-world impacts of executive rulemaking. Richard Revesz, who was nominated this month to head the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has published multiple volumes on how the government can measure the costs and benefits of its rulemakings. The New York University law professor and founder of the Institute for Policy Integrity also is an expert on environmental litigation — an important attribute given the role a conservative Supreme Court now plays in shaping regulatory policy.

There is “deep thinking going on in the community about what information needs to be before the agency” in light of the importance major questions took in West Virginia v. EPA, Earthjustice attorney Kirtki Datla told a Sept. 20 Institute for Policy Integrity event.

FERC's Willie Phillips joined the Institute for Policy Integrity to discuss a shifting U.S. energy landscape and how FERC is aiding the clean power transition.

FERC’s latest decision “should be the final nail in the MOPR’s coffin,” Sarah Ladin, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said in a statement Friday. “By rejecting the request to expand NYISO’s previous rule to the rest of the state, the commission closes a chapter on overly expansive rules that undermine state authority and harm wholesale market competition.”

Peggy Shepard, the co-chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), gave the administration a “D” grade on its high-profile efforts to elevate EJ throughout government decision-making. She told a New York University Institute for Policy Integrity event that the WHEJAC was able to, within the first three weeks of the new administration, put together 100 pages of recommendations, “and it took a year to get a response to this and the response was, in many cases, inadequate.”

Michael Gergen, a partner at Latham & Watkins and a board member at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI), told a Sept. 20 event held by IPI that the GHG Reduction Fund’s multi-part structure encourages EPA to use $7 billion directly for projects and invest the direct the remaining $20 billion toward other entities in a green bank structure, which provides various groups funds that can in turn finance projects.

The often-cited estimate of the law’s climate spending “actually pretty dramatically understates the total scale of investment,” argued Jeremiah Baumann, chief of staff at DOE’s Office of the Undersecretary of Infrastructure, during a Sept. 20 event hosted by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Nicky Sheats, director of the Center for the Urban Environment at Kean University in Union, NJ, who also advises the White House on EJ issues, accused the industry of “trying to undermine the regulations by saying they should be able to trade jobs for pollution” at a Sept. 20 Institute for Policy Integrity event where the proposal was discussed. “No other community is asked to do that,” he said, calling the effort “extortion.”

A proposal from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that would standardize public companies’ disclosures of climate risk information is getting strong support from the general public, investors, companies of various sizes across a wide range of sectors, law and business scholars, public officials, climate scientists, and environmental advocates – including EDF. We joined the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law to submit letters supporting the proposed standards. Our letters focus on three reasons why the SEC is on strong legal footing.

The quality of lawyering matters. For proof of this, you need look no further than the experience of one Donald Trump. Presidents normally win about 70 percent of their regulatory-law cases, The Washington Post has reported. But the Trump administration lost 78 percent of its cases, according to data from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law.