What Does an Outgoing Administration Do When Its Party Might Lose the Election?

Silly question! If they can ignore the people who were suffering most in the home foreclosure/frozen credit/unemployment crisis, focusing instead on saving big financial institutions, that also appears to be the going-forward “for the few weeks we have left in office” policy of the current administration. This time, it’s a cowardly and shameful attempt to appease all those big business and special interests who made those massive campaign contributions in exchange for a promise to get rid of those inconvenient environmental rules.

Reuters (Deborah Zabarenko writing on November 2, 2008) noted what the Bush Administration has in mind: “Whether it's getting wolves off the Endangered Species List, allowing power plants to operate near national parks, loosening regulations for factory farm waste or making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations… [t]he one change most environmentalists want, a mandatory program to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, is not among these so-called ‘midnight regulations.’”

Except some of these big business players have children and grandchildren who do now and will in the future breathe the air, drink the water, live in a globally warming climate and experience the open spaces of America . This is their heritage that our government is planning to compromise. "The Bush administration has had eight years in office and has issued more regulations than any administration in history," said Eli Lehrer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (quoted in the above Reuter’s piece). "At this point, in the current economic climate, it would be especially harmful to push through ill-considered regulations in the final days of the administration."

As these regulations make their way through the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, you’d think it would be easy for the next administration simply to undo the effort. Not quite. You have to go through another set of hearings and rule-making procedures, some companies might already have started these operations by the time rules change (and file law suits to stop the government from shutting down their deals), and let’s face it, the new administration is going to have a lot of priorities on its plate in January.

In the ordinary course of business, these changes would take a lot more time, and the federal agencies involved would need to plough through piles of relevant data and public input. Speed is of the essence since the rules need thirty to sixty days to take effect, and if they are not in place when the new President takes office, he or she has the right to decline implementing the changes.

Want to see exactly how crazy this is? “For example, one Interior Department rule that would erode protections for endangered species in favor of mining interests drew more than 300,000 comments from the public, which officials said they planned to review in a week, a pace that [Matt Madia of OMB Watch, which monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, through which these proposed regulations must pass.] called ‘pretty ludicrous.’”

We must remember.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.