Environmental Law Commons^™

Reforming The Federal Regulatory Review Process, Joanne Spalding, Andres Restrepo

FIU Law Review

For decades, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has overseen the development of federal regulatory policies with a strong emphasis on benefit-cost analysis. Despite its conceptual appeal, this analytic tool consistently shortchanges environmental and public health protection, with especially negative consequences for environmental justice communities. In this article, we address some of those shortcomings, focusing in particular on the standard agency practice of arithmetically discounting regulatory costs and benefits that accrue in the future. We propose that the OIRA abandon this practice as it relates to non-market goods, such as human lives saved, and instead work toward a …