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Ugh, and of course he doesn't actually have citations for his claims there. Thanks for at least pointing the direction out.
EO 12866 isn't externally enforceable, and to the extent it 'requires' agencies to evaluate costs, that ends up being just that :
This is interesting, but it's a very far cry from Mendeloff's insistence that only the "lowest feasible level" is allowed, and indeed at its time it was supposed to be about reducing the often-steep overregulation that other agencies had invoked. (It also sets a fairly speedy timeline that agencies are supposed to meet, and if you want to have a laugh some day compare it to their actual movement rate.)
My objection is less that Mendeloff claims that there is some increased time burden from review, and more that he claims that there's a process that only allows a very narrow band of regulation such that this time burden must be exceedingly long, outside the scope of a single OSHA director's run, and (implicitly) that it requires such resources and focus that OSHA can not do these things in parallel. And that's not really the case, in no small part because that first step falters.
((And his own piece makes clear that he's really just after harsher limits than can be demonstrated in evidence: "What changes might help? For health standards, change the law to allow lower exposure limits based on lesser evidence when the reduction is moderate." Which is just open season for OSHA to make up numbers.))
Mendeloff, in other works, often points to benzene regulations, and that's not unreasonable given that OSHA spent nearly twenty years on it. But if you look at the timeline, the overwhelming majority of this was not the regulatory overhead side, nor the OSHA-specific work of coordinating with industry to determine feasibility, but trying to gather data to support their new and stringent standard being so low. Almost all of the long lead time occurs because OSHA wants to set standards at the bleeding edge where data was not yet present.
And that might not even be wrong as a policy decision, since at least ideally clear risks would be handled by industry practices or by other regulations. But it drastically changes both the calculus of what revisions would be necessary, and what Mendeloff is asking for.
I certainly believe you that Mendeloff is exagerrating his claims, his line about the lowest feasible level just seemed minor to me compared to his + the other interviewed subjects' main argument about ever-increasing procedural requirements.
Definitely interested in the idea that the procedural requirements are less of a time burden than the data digging required by overambitious regulatory targets - though can those really be separated? It seems like a ton of the procedural load is specifically around data collection and review.
Where do you access the timeline / breakdown of how the time was used for the Benzene process? I couldn't seem to find it in the EHP writeup.
At least for the data collection side, my argument's that they're doing a lot of stuff that's very time-consuming and difficult specifically so they can promote very low targets and limited thresholds of economic feasibility, and they don't have to do that and still be useful as a regulatory agency. It's still a time burden to prove, even for low standards of certainty, obvious signals and straightforward risks, but it's a lot easier to go "Professor, Fire Hot" than it is to isolate a one-in-a-million risk that only a thousand people got exposed to.
I'm afraid the best approach is to look through the procedural history for court cases and the sources used to promote the final rules: Industrial Union Department v. American Petroleum Institute makes clear that OSHA had requested a study in "spring of 1976", received a preliminary result in April, 1977. While they had diddled the figures to make them match what OSHA wanted (by incorrectly assuming that the historic leukemia deaths were from <25 ppm exposures, when at least some of the exposures were probably much higher), the data was strong for exposures around 100 ppm. OSHA just didn't want to push that or even a reasonable safety factor from that because it had begun accepting a zero-threshold model for most carcinogenic materials, and because there wasn't much space below the (then-voluntary) 10 ppm threshold already present.
Getting numbers that precise with any accuracy required a lot of work and a lot of time, simply because the signal was so tiny. OSHA maintained (and afaik, has not been stopped by courts) from treating one-in-a-million risks as 'significant' for regulatory purposes, but you can look at the analysis and watch the studies walk toward the eventual threshold OSHA wanted. That wasn't really done until the mid-1980s, though, arguably the earliest with Crump 1984 but OSHA looked to depend more on Rinsky 1987.
By contrast, again pointing to IFU v API, OSHA asked a consultant to evaluate and estimate the costs of a 1 ppm threshold in October 1976, and that consultant finished the entire economic impact study by May 1977.
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