Recent Projects

A United States District Judge recently ruled that the Department of Education’s repeated delays of the Borrower Defense Rule were illegal. We submitted an amicus brief in this case. This 2016 regulation was designed to help students who have been defrauded by for-profit educational institutions discharge their federal student loans. Under Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education delayed implementation of the Borrower Defense Rule three times, prompting a legal challenge.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently issued a proposed rule that would revise implementing regulations for Title X of the Public Health Service Act (Title X), the country’s only publicly funded family planning, serving millions of women annually. Though the grant program is already bound by the legal limits on directly using federal grants to fund abortion services, the proposed rule now seeks to encumber entities that provide both Title X-eligible programs and abortion-related services with additional restrictions. Our comments focus on serious errors and oversights in the Department’s analysis of the Proposed Rule’s costs and benefits. First, HHS misstates and misapplies the standard for conducting a regulatory impact analysis under Executive Order 12,866. Second, HHS ignores the Proposed Rule’s potentially substantial indirect costs—most notably, the health consequences stemming from patients’ reduced access to healthcare services. Third, HHS fails to assess the distributional impacts of the Proposed Rule.

As part of a larger plan to revise regulations on tobacco and nicotine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering limiting the nicotine content of combusted cigarettes in an effort to make them less addictive. In response to FDA’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking on this potential policy, our comments offered advice, drawing from recent economic scholarship, on how the agency could assess a nicotine limit’s costs and benefits.

Under Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has delayed implementation of the Borrower Defense Rule three times. This 2016 regulation was designed to help students who have been defrauded by for-profit educational institutions discharge their federal student loans. In our amicus brief to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, we argue that the delays must be vacated because the Department failed to provide a reasoned explanation for any of them.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently proposed a rule purporting to clarify the scope of statutory protections for medical providers who decline to participate in certain procedures, such as abortion or euthanasia, due to religious or moral objections. HHS issued a similar rule in 2008 but rescinded it in 2011 due to concern that the 2008 rule’s expansive definitions of statutory terms would lead providers to believe, incorrectly, that statutory protections extended not just to refusals to perform particular procedures, but also to refusals to care for particular types of patients, such as LGBTQ individuals. Our comments criticize HHS for reviving the 2008 rule’s expansive definitions without acknowledging its 2011 findings that such definitions would foster confusion and discrimination.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) within the Department of the Interior is tasked with setting safety and environmental standards for offshore oil and gas production and exploration in federal waters. While BSEE updated its safety requirements in 2016, it now proposes to weaken and repeal some of these safety requirements in order to encourage more oil and gas production. In our comments on the proposed rule, we argue that the agency has failed to provide a reasoned explanation for repealing these requirements, which were part of a comprehensive update to safety regulations that had not been revised since 1988.

The Department of Labor recently proposed rescission of tip regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act. We submitted comments explaining the Department’s failures, including to quantify important effects of the proposed rescission, to consider a range of realistic assumptions, or even to explain why the rescission’s purported benefits justify the total possible costs.

In a decision ordering the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to implement a fair housing rule that the Trump administration sought to delay, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cited Policy Integrity’s amicus brief in the case. The Small Area Fair Market Rent rule, finalized under President Obama, seeks to give low-income families greater access to housing in higher-rent neighborhoods and break up areas of concentrated poverty. Our brief argued that, in suspending the rule’s implementation for two years, HUD violated principles of administrative law by disregarding economic impacts and failing to seek public comment. Judge Howell found that HUD’s decision to delay the rule exceeded the agency’s legal authority and that the reasons it gave for doing so were arbitrary and capricious. She ordered HUD to implement the rule by January 1, 2018.