Rutgers scholar Stuart Shapiro, an expert on federal and state regulating powers, is available to comment on the latest developments regarding the Trump Administration EPA and its finalization of both its repeal of President Obama’s signature climate change policy the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and its replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) regulation.
Shapiro said, “It is clear that ACE is less protective of human health and the climate than CPP was, and that ACE has costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Reflecting on the cost-benefit analysis of CPP and ACE that EPA produced, Shapiro said, “Cost-benefit analysis has been required for major regulations since the Reagan administration. On the one hand, analysis is inherently uncertain and dependent upon assumptions. This makes it subject to manipulations unless best practices are followed. The analyses by the Trump administration are rife with manipulation and as such diminish public faith in economic analysis. . . Requiring agencies to disclose the costs and benefits of their actions increases transparency, no matter how much an agency tries to obfuscate the impact of their actions. That allows courts, Congress, and the public to better evaluate their actions.”
Shapiro is a professor and associate dean of faculty at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Public Policy. He is a former policy analyst at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), and previously worked at the Office of Management and Budget under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Shapiro can be reached at [email protected].
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