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.

The D.C. Circuit overturned an EPA rule that would have dramatically cut down interstate air pollution, ruling that the agency had exceeded its authority devising regulations affecting more than two dozen states.

Policy Integrity sent our report, Balanced Justice, to United States Sentencing Commission in response to its call for public comments on possible priority issues for forthcoming amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines. The guidelines are used to set a uniform sentencing policy for individuals and organizations convicted of felonies and serious misdemeanors.

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.

Policy Integrity submitted comments to ACUS (Administrative Conference of the United States) regarding various proposed recommendations to be considered at its 56th Plenary Session. As an independent federal agency that works to improve federal agency procedures, ACUS held its biannual assembly to discuss and vote on recommendations around issues such as regulatory analysis requirements, midnight rules, and coordination of multi-agency responsibilities.

Today, we sent a letter to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget suggesting ways that that federal agencies can use data to work more closely and maximize their efforts on behalf of the American public.

Today we submitted comments in response to OIRA’s annual report to Congress. Among the several specific suggestions is that the employment impacts of regulations be integrated into cost-benefit analysis in a balanced, transparent way. We recommend that OIRA should be careful to avoid any language that reinforces the mistaken belief that regulations inevitably lead to unemployment and that any analysis should do its best to model net employment impact, not just one region or sector.

Policy Integrity is conducting an empirical analysis of power plant emissions in New York City to evaluate the potential efficacy of various policy tools that can reduce or shift electricity demand. The complete project will quantify the health impacts of reducing pollution from specific local sources, and will try to connect the range of legal options available to shift demand with those pollution-reduction and health-improvement outcomes. Today we are posting information on the data and the STATA code that we will use to conduct the analysis. In the coming months, we will publish the results of our analysis as it becomes available.