Center for Progressive Reform Issue Alert Released: Protecting People and the Environment by the Stroke of a Presidential Pen Seven New Executive Orders for President Obama’s Second Term

Recently, the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), "a nonprofit research and educational organization . . . working to protect health, safety, and the environment through analysis and commentary," published an issue alert titled, Protecting People and the Environment by the Stroke of a Presidential Pen Seven New Executive Orders for President Obama’s Second Term (2012).  According to the press release for the 30-page alert available here, CPR recommends:

seven Executive Orders for the second term of the Obama Administration, all of which are directed at addressing critical public health, safety, and environmental challenges. Each Order directs government agencies to take specific steps to create meaningful new safeguards for people and the environment. Adopting and successfully carrying out these recommendations would help to cement President Obama’s legacy as a strong defender of public health, safety, and the environment.

• Executive Order to Take Action on Climate Change Mitigation. This Order would set a detailed regulatory agenda directing the EPA to fulfill its obligations under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources. The Order would instruct the EPA to finalize its proposed standards for new or modified power plants and oil refineries, and most crucially, to develop standards for a variety of existing sources—all within stated deadlines that would signal the Administration’s commitment to timely, unimpeded progress.

• Executive Order to Prioritize and Coordinate Planning for Climate Change Adaptation. This Order would require agencies to consider how climate change will affect their proposed and ongoing activities and to design their actions in ways that ease, rather than exacerbate, the challenges faced by communities and ecosystems. So, for example, agencies involved in setting policy for coastal development, including federal flood insurance, should develop new rules that discourage building in areas likely to be overcome by sea-level rise. Agencies concerned with ecosystem preservation should consider whether moving species north could protect them as temperatures increase.

• Executive Order to Avoid Dangerous Imports. This Order would create a Cabinet-level Working Group to address the cross-cutting problems posed by imported foods, drugs, and consumer products, focusing primarily on ways to hold importers accountable for verifying the safety of their suppliers’ products and to expand enforcement authority over foreign companies. Under the Order, the Working Group would also study the value and feasibility of other options, such as requiring agencies to pre-approve the equivalence of foreign safety systems, addressing the obstacles to reform presented by trade agreements, and improving coordination among the agencies.

• Executive Order to Protect the Health and Safety of Children and Future Generations. This Order would charge an interagency Task Force with developing and carrying out an affirmative agenda of coordinated regulatory actions to address high priority threats to the health and safety of children and future generations. The agenda setting process would be iterative, and the first iteration would address children’s workplace health and safety, asthma, toxic chemicals, and climate change.

• Executive Order to Protect Contingent Workers. This Order would tailor OSHA’s existing enforcement and voluntary consultation programs to better account for the unique occupational safety and health challenges that contingent workers face. Contingent workers are a growing subset of the labor force, and include, for example, construction and farming day laborers, warehouse laborers hired through staffing agencies, and hotel housekeepers supplied by temp firms. Though “contingent work” is not easily defined, from a worker’s perspective, the most salient characteristic of contingent work is the absence of an express or implied contract for long-term employment. The Order would also establish an affirmative regulatory agenda to protect contingent workers against musculoskeletal injuries and expand OSHA’s cooperation efforts with the foreign consulates for countries that have large numbers of their nationals employed as contingent workers in the United States.

• Executive Order to Reform OIRA’s Role in the Regulatory System. This Order would reorient OIRA’s role in the regulatory system so that it is aimed toward working proactively with agencies to help them achieve their statutory missions of protecting public health, safety, and the environment. This Order would rescind requirements for cost-benefit analysis, eschew review of minor rule makings, improve transparency, and charge OIRA with addressing the problem of regulatory delay.

• Executive Order to Restore the SBA Office of Advocacy’s Focus on Small Businesses. This Order would direct the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Advocacy to focus its rulemaking interventions so that they help truly small businesses—those with 20 or fewer employees—and to assist these truly small businesses participate more effectively in the rulemaking process. This Order would also revoke an existing Executive Order that directs the Office of Advocacy to work closely with OIRA.