Trucking Rules Called ‘Radioactive’ After Making $1 Billion List
Trucking Rules Called `Radioactive'
Peoplenet
Two of the seven most expensive pending regulations highlighted in an exchange between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner would limit and monitor how long truck drivers are behind the wheel.
Two of the seven most expensive pending regulations highlighted in an exchange between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner would limit and monitor how long truck drivers are behind the wheel. Source: Peoplenet
President Barack Obama’s inclusion of two proposed rules on truckers’ driving hours on a list of the seven most expensive pending U.S. regulations makes them so politically sensitive they may not survive, according to an industry group.
Items on the list are “radioactive for Republican lawmakers in the House and a lot of the Senate as well,” Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said in an interview yesterday. “Any one of those regulations become much more difficult to push through. They’ll be much more under the scrutiny of Congress.”
Obama Aug. 30 listed the seven proposals in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, responding to the Ohio Republican’s request for pending regulations that would cost business $1 billion or more.
Four proposals from the Environmental Protection Agency had the highest projected costs. The other $1 billion rule, proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, would require rear-view cameras on cars. NHTSA was required to write that rule under a 2008 law passed by Congress.
Congressional Republicans have focused on regulation as a barrier to reducing unemployment. Obama’s administration last month said it would eliminate unneeded rules to save businesses $10 billion over five years.
219 Rules
Obama’s administration is writing 219 rules with a price tag of $100 million or more, compared with 103 implemented in the first two years of President George W. Bush’s administration, Boehner said in a statement yesterday.
One forum for transportation policy proposals is likely to be the upcoming multiyear highway bill, which typically includes directives from congressional oversight panels to NHTSA and other transportation agencies.
Caroline Califf, a spokeswoman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Jena Longo, spokeswoman for the Senate Commerce Committee, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Truck Driver Rules
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, carved out of a small office within the Federal Highway Administration under a 1999 law, has been trying to revise work rules for drivers for more than a decade.
Its two proposed rules may scale back the maximum number of hours behind the wheel to 10 per day, from 11 now, and mandate electronic data recorders to keep track of drivers’ hours.
The owner-operators association, based in Grain Valley, Missouri, claimed another victory earlier this week in their fight against electronic data recorders. A federal court Aug. 26 invalidated an earlier Transportation Department effort to require companies with safety violations to install recorders to track driving time.
Boehner’s effort to highlight business costs underscores arguments by small trucking businesses with low profit margins that pending regulations will make life a lot harder, Spencer said.
EPA Criticism
The EPA was the regulator most frequently cited by companies such as ConocoPhillips (COP) and business groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers when Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, invited them to list their complaints about federal requirements.
Of 111 regulations cited in a report released by Issa in February, 57 were issued by the EPA.
“It’s time for a real conversation about protecting our health and the environment while growing our economy,” Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a blog on Huffington Post yesterday. “When big polluters distort EPA’s proposals as a drag on our economy, they ignore the fact that clean air, clear water and healthy workers are all essential to American businesses.”
Environmentalists backing the four EPA rules on the White House list said they were disappointed that Obama didn’t offer a stronger defense of the benefits to society from lowering ozone levels and cleaning up power-plant emissions.
“The administration has focused too much on trying to minimize the costs,” Amit Narang, regulatory policy advocate for Public Citizen in Washington, said in an interview. “Given the way the House Republicans have taken this up, we would like to see them also extol the virtues of regulation as well.”
$19.7 Million
In 2009 and 2010, the benefits of the most expensive rules reviewed by the White House, including the public health benefits of lives saved, exceeded the costs by tens of billions of dollars, Obama said in the letter to Boehner.
“These rules are merely proposed, and before finalizing any of them, we will take account of public comments and concerns and give careful consideration to cost-saving possibilities and alternatives,” Obama said.
Not all of the regulations on the White House list show benefits that exceed their costs.
NHTSA estimated costs as high as $2.7 billion for equipping 16.6 million U.S. vehicles a year with rear-view cameras, which would mean spending between $11.8 million to $19.7 million per life saved. Proposals at $6.1 million or less are considered cost-beneficial, NHTSA said in a November analysis.
‘Not Life-Threatening’
The agency, which delayed the rollout of the regulation earlier this year, will complete work by the end of 2011, said Lynda Tran, a NHTSA spokeswoman. Tran declined comment on the rule’s cost.
Obama should immediately issue an executive order asking agencies to hold off on rules with a substantial economic impact until the economy improves, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said.
“Maybe they’re important,” Donohue said at a presentation in Washington yesterday. “But if they’re not life-threatening issues, we ought to hold them off for a while.”
Highway fatalities are one of the leading causes of injury- related death in the U.S., with 32,788 people dying in crashes last year, according to NHTSA. There were 3,380 truck-related deaths in 2009, according to the motor carrier administration.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Plungis in Washington at jplungis@bloomberg.net; Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bernard Kohn at bkohn2@bloomberg.net
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