Recent Projects

The DOT and EPA finalized fuel efficiency standards today for cars and light duty trucks, increasing fuel efficiency to 54.5 mpg by Model Year 2025. The agencies calculate that consumer savings under the new standards will be comparable to lowering the price of gasoline by $1 per gallon by 2025.

Sadly, the idea that market forces can drive down the cost of public health regulation has lost favor in the past few years. The EPA’s long-delayed, first-ever greenhouse gas standards for new power plants (New Source Performance Standards or NSPS) offers an opportunity to make market mechanisms cool again.

Policy Integrity submitted comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) on its plan for periodic retrospective review pursuant to Executive Order 13563, which asks agencies to consider how best to promote retrospective analyses of existing rules. We found that the DOE’s plan could do a better job of updating and expanding regulations to enhance net benefits rather than just minimization of compliance burdens and administrative cost cutting, which the plan largely focuses on.

Today, EPA was supposed to propose rules to curb stormwater run-off—the murky, polluted water that gushes into rivers and oceans after heavy rains. They now say the proposal will come in May.

The EPA released its first ever greenhouse gas standards for new power plants after a delay at the beginning of the year. The New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) limit emissions from new plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity produced.

Cars that hit the streets in 2017 through 2025 will run on far less fuel than they do now. Last summer, the Obama Administration announced a deal with automakers aiming to up the average to 56 miles per gallon and EPA-DOT proposed a new rule that would hold them to that standard.