Recent Projects

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a ban on multiple conditions of use of chrysotile asbestos. The Institute for Policy Integrity and Professor Rachel Rothschild at the University of Michigan Law School submitted comments on the agency’s economic analysis of the proposed rule, identifying numerous ways EPA underestimated the health benefits from reduced cancer cases and lung illnesses and could strengthen the robust scientific, economic and legal basis for EPA’s proposed rule.

In February 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed: (1) to revoke its May 2020 finding that it is not appropriate and necessary to regulate coal- and oil-fired electric utility steam generating units (EGUs) under Clean Air Act (CAA) Section 112 (2020 Action), and (2) to reaffirm the Agency's April 2016 finding that it remains appropriate and necessary to regulate hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions from EGUs after considering cost (2016 Supplemental Finding). Our comments on the Proposal explain why EPA should finalize both these actions as consistent with the Clean Air Act, case law, executive directives, principles of sound economic analysis, and past agency practice.

We filed joint comments to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) in response to its advance notice of proposed rulemaking Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings. We advised that OSHA develop a heat standard that will be robust to climate impacts, provided recommendations on costs and benefits to consider in the economic analysis for the rule, and encouraged OSHA to use other facets of its statutory authority to complement its rulemaking efforts.

We filed an amicus brief explaining how NHTSA and EPA's decision to finalize a rule that, even under their own analysis, will be net-costly to society, is arbitrary and capricious. 

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of Engineers published the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which considerably restricts the waters and wetlands that are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. We filed briefs in the Northern District of California and District of South Carolina focusing on the agencies’ economic analysis, which the agencies use to obscure the rule’s anticipated harms. We later filed in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Northern District of New York, the District of Massachusetts, and the District of Maryland.