In the News

For the first time, the Congressional Review Act was invoked to disapprove regulations—including at the EPA—promulgated by a prior Republican administration, writes Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. The Biden administration also found ways to undo several other Trump-era rules without using either the CRA or rulemaking, he writes, and explains how.

Two key principles define American federalism. First, states can generally pursue policies favored by their people, even if other states prefer different policies. But, second, states cannot pursue policies that seriously harm other states. Due to interstate mobility, infections resulting from inadequate policies in Florida will harm other states, burdening their healthcare systems, increasing their healthcare costs, and worsening the wellbeing of their citizens and the state of their economies. 

The newly proposed standards for model years 2023 through 2025 are not particularly ambitious, resulting in smaller emissions reductions than those that the Obama administration had prescribed back in 2012. But, maybe more importantly, they hint at the direction of future vehicle standards.

An important lesson from the Trump days is how a robust cost-benefit analysis helps an agency both defend itself in court and guard against future rollbacks. But agencies must also ensure that they finalize any big policies in time to have the rules reviewed in court before the next transition, which means that there is no time to waste.

Drip pricing has no legitimate business purpose and harms consumers in at least two key ways. It can also be damaging to businesses, and it is not a problem that the market will correct on its own. That's why several colleagues from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and I filed a petition for rule-making last month, calling on the F.T.C. to ban the use of drip pricing. 

Richard Revesz is interviewed about the social cost of carbon and its crucial role in crafting smarter energy and climate policies. Justin Gundlach and Peter Howard discuss how the SCC can be further improved.

This kind of bot would help catch human errors and help make regulations more accurate. Language processing tools could analyze a proposed rule to determine its subject matter area, then crawl through related academic research to find and submit relevant scientific studies to the agency. This could help improve the government’s analytical basis for its policy choices.

Conflating economic problems has led FERC to implement inappropriately broad rules without grounding its decisions in rigorous economic analysis. The Expanded MOPR was based on a faulty premise and unsupported by economic theory. Ending the snipe hunt for state exercises of market power in capacity markets is a critical first step toward empowering stakeholders to craft durable economic solutions that allow markets to work.

It’s time to change course and take an approach that avoids bad investments and climate pollution. FERC should use its authority to meaningfully consider climate impacts and reject proposals that are inconsistent with national energy needs. 

To shed light on the meaning that the Trump Administration ascribed to this doctrine, we reviewed the arguments in the briefs filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the doctrine’s scope.