Richard J. Pierce, Jr. · April 2011
79 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 845 (2011)
Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro’s The People’s Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety and the Environment is compulsory reading for anyone who is interested in the performance of regulatory agencies. It is well structured, well researched, well reasoned, and well written.
The authors analyze the performance of five agencies they call the “protector agencies”—the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”). They paint a bleak picture of the performance of these agencies over the past few decades, but they place little, if any, of the responsibility for that poor performance on the agencies themselves. Instead, the authors attribute the disappointing performance of the agencies to other institutions. For instance, they devote chapters of the book to discussion of the President’s requirement that agencies engage in cost-benefit analysis before issuing a major rule, as well as other forms of presidential interference with agency decisionmaking. The authors also discuss partisan gridlock and other dysfunctions in Congress, ossification of the agency rulemaking process created by excessively intrusive judicial review of agency actions, the weakening of the civil service, and inadequate funding and staffing of the agencies.
