Floor Statement on Nomination of John Graham to Lead OIRA
Mr. President, the nomination of John Graham to administer the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, known as OIRA, is an important nomination, although the office is little known. I say that because the office, though little known, has a far reach throughout our government. It particularly has a significant effect on a role of government that is critically important and cherished by the public. That is the protective role.
This responsibility, when applied to the environment or the health and safety of consumers and workers, is worth a vigorous defense. It is a role which the public wants and expects the government to play. I fear it is a role from which the present administration seems to be pulling away. It is in that context I view this nomination.
With that in mind, I have weighed Dr. Graham’s nomination carefully. I have reviewed his history and his extensive record of advocacy and published materials. I listened carefully to his testimony before the Governmental Affairs Committee. I did so, inclined, as I usually am, to give the benefit of the doubt to the President’s nominees. In this case, my doubts remained so persistent and the nominee’s record on issues that are at the heart of the purpose of the office for which he has been nominated are so troubling that I remain unconvinced that he will be able to appropriately fulfill the responsibilities for which he has been nominated.
I fear in fact, he might – not with bad intentions but with good intentions – contribute to the weakening of government’s protective role in matters of the environment, health, and safety. That is why I have decided to oppose Dr. Graham’s nomination.
Let me speak first about the protective role of government. Among the most essential duties that government has is to shield our citizens from dangers from which they cannot protect themselves. We think of this most obviously in terms of our national security or of enforcement of the law at home against those who violate the law and commit crimes.
But the protective function also includes protecting people from breathing polluted air, drinking toxic water, eating contaminated food, working under hazardous conditions, being exposed to unsafe consumer products, and falling prey to consumer fraud. That is not big government; that is responsible, protective government. It is one of the most broad and supportive roles that government plays.
OIRA, this office which Dr. Graham has been nominated to direct, is the gatekeeper, if you will, of government’s protective role. OIRA reviews major rules proposed by agencies and assesses information on risk, cost, benefits, and alternatives before the regulations can go forward. Then if the Administrator of OIRA finds an agency’s proposed rule unacceptable, they return the rule to the agency for further consideration. That is considerable power.
This nominee would continue the traditional role but charter a further, more ambitious role by declaring that he intends to involve himself more in the front end of the regulatory process, I assume. That is what he said before our committee. I assume by this he meant he will take part in setting priorities in working with agencies on regulations even before they have formalized and finalized their own ideas to protect the public. So his views on regulation are critically important, even more important because of this stated desire he has to be involved in the front end of the process.
It also means he could call upon the agencies to conduct time-consuming and resource-intensive research and analysis before they actually start developing protections needed under our environmental statutes. Some others have referred to this as paralysis by analysis; in other words, paralyzing the intention, stifling the intention of various agencies of our government to issue regulations which protect the environment, public health, safety, consumers, by demanding so much analysis that the regulations are ultimately delayed so long they are stifled.
OIRA, looking back, was implicated during earlier administrations in some abuses that both compromised the protective role of government and undermined OIRA’s own credibility. There was a history of OIRA reviewing regulations in secret, without disclosure of meetings or context with interested parties.
Rules to protect health, safety, and the environment would languish at OIRA, literally, for years. I am not making that up. Regulations would be stymied literally for years with no explanation. Then OIRA would return them to the agencies with many required changes, essentially overruling the expert judgment of the agencies, which not only compromised the health and safety of the public which was unprotected by those regulations for all that time but also frustrated the will of Congress which enacted the laws that were being implemented by those regulations.
To be fair, of course, it is too soon to say whether similar problems will occur at OIRA during the Bush administration, and Dr. Graham himself expressed a desire to uphold the transparency of decision-making at OIRA. However, the potential for abuse remains. That is particularly so for delaying the process, with question after question, while the public remains unprotected. Let me turn directly to Dr. Graham’s record.
In the hearing on his nomination, Dr. Graham acknowledged, for instance, his opposition to the assumptions underlying our landmark environmental laws – that every American has a “right” to drink safe water and breathe clean air. Indeed, Dr. Graham has devoted a good part of his career to arguing that those laws mis-allocate society’s resources, suggesting we should focus more on cost-benefit principles, which take into consideration, I think, one view of the bottom line, but may sacrifice peoples’ right to a clean and healthy environment and a fuller understanding of the bottom-line costs involved when people are left unprotected.
Dr. Graham has written generally, for example, that the private sector should not be required to spend as much money as it does on programs to control toxic pollution, that he believes, on average, are less cost-effective than medical or injury-prevention efforts, where presumably more money should be spent. But why force us to make such a choice when both are necessary for the public interest?
Dr. Graham has said society’s resources might be better spent on bicycle helmets or violence prevention programs than on reducing children’s exposure to pesticide residues or on cutting back toxic pollution from oil refineries. This is the kind of result that his very theoretical and I would say, respectfully, impractical, cost-benefit analysis produces. Bicycle helmets save lives, and violence is bad for our society. But the problem is that Dr. Graham’s provocative theorizing fails to answer the question of how to protect the health of, for instance, the family that lives next to the oil refinery or in the neighborhood.
His rational priority setting may be so rational that it becomes, to those who don’t make it past the cost-benefit analysis, cruel or inhumane, although I know that it is not his intention.
Dr. Graham sought to allay concerns by explaining that his provocative views were asserted as a university professor, and that in administering OIRA he would enforce environmental and other laws as written. I appreciate his assurances.
But for me, his long-standing opinions and advocacy that matters of economy and efficiency supersede the environmental and public health rights of the citizenry still leave me unsettled and make him an unlikely nominee to lead OIRA.
Dr. Graham’s writings and statements are controversial in their own right, but they are all the more so in light of the actions the Bush administration has already taken with regard to protective regulations.
It began with the so-called Card memo, written by the President’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, which delayed a number of protective regulations issued by the Clinton administration. The Card memo was followed by a series of troubling decisions – to reject the new standard for arsenic in drinking water; to propose lifting the rules protecting groundwater against the threat of toxic waste from “hard-rock” mining operations on public lands; to reconsider the rules safeguarding pristine areas of our national forests; and to weaken the energy-efficiency standard for central air conditioners. So his views are disconcerting.
In the context of this administration and the direction in which it has gone, they are absolutely alarming. We have received statements from several respected organizations opposing this nomination. I do at this time want to read a partial list of those because they are impressive: the Wilderness Society, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, National Environmental Trust, OMB Watch, AFL-CIO, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Rivers, Center for Science and the Public Interest, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Mineral Policy Center, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the United Auto Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, The United States Public Interest Research Group. We have received, Members of this body, letters from many of these organizations and others urging us to oppose this nomination.
We have also received letters against the nomination from over 30 department heads and faculty members at medical and public health schools across the United States, from numerous other scholars in the fields of law, economics, science, and business, and from former heads of Federal departments and agencies that have been referred to earlier in this debate. I ask unanimous consent that these various letters of opposition to Dr. Graham’s nomination be printed in the Record.
As a Senator reviewing a President’s nominee, exercising the constitutional advice and consent responsibility we have been given, I always try not to consider whether I would have chosen this nominee because it is not my choice to make. However, it is my responsibility to consider whether the nominee would appropriately fulfill the responsibilities of this office; whether I have sufficient confidence that the nominee would do so to vote to confirm him.
Where we are dealing, as we are here, with what I have described as the protective role of government, where people’s safety and health and the protection of the environment is on the line, I approach my responsibility with an extra measure of caution because the consequences of confirming a nominee who lacks sufficient commitment to protecting the public health and safety through protective regulations are real and serious to our people and to our principles.
Dr. Graham, in the meetings I have had with him, appears to me to be an honorable man. I just disagree with his record and worry he will not adequately, if nominated, fulfill the responsibilities of this office. So taking all of those factors into account, I have reached the conclusion that I cannot and will not support the nomination of Dr. Graham to be the Director of OIRA. I yield the floor.