The Economist - United States

Scott Pruitt embarks on a campaign to stifle science at the EPA [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:02:19 -0700

SCOTT PRUITT, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is still standing after a fusillade of scandals that would have felled a lesser cabinet member. As soon as he took up his post, Mr Pruitt lodged in a luxury flat owned by a lobbyist, paying $50 per night only on the evenings he slept there—a remarkable bargain for Capitol Hill. Mr Pruitt denied any impropriety, but it emerged this week that he had met his landlord’s husband, also a lobbyist representing a pork manufacturer before the agency, contradicting his earlier claims. Mr Pruitt struck similar sweetheart deals in his previous job as attorney-general of Oklahoma. But since coming to Washington, other furores show that Mr Pruitt has let his newfound prominence get to his head.

He spent lots of taxpayer cash on first-class airline tickets, tripled the size of his security detail (which accompanied him on holiday to Disneyland) and installed a soundproof phone booth in his office, costing $43,000—which the Government Accountability Office says violated federal spending laws. At one point, Mr Pruitt reportedly tried using his motorcade’s flashing lights and sirens to expedite a trip to dinner at Le Diplomate, a once-trendy French restaurant in Washington. There are at least six current investigations into his conduct, and four Republican congressmen have called for his resignation.

Given all that, it is easy to overlook what Mr Pruitt is actually doing at the helm of the EPA. On April 24th he unveiled a new policy which would prohibit the agency from using studies backed by confidential data, like medical records, when drafting environmental regulations. He has removed scientists affiliated with universities from the department’s scientific advisory committees. Staff morale has plunged.

This is the culmination of a decades-long campaign against the “secret science” underpinning environmental regulation. In 1993 researchers at Harvard published the “Six Cities study”, which definitively linked air quality to premature death using confidential medical records from 8,000 people. The study prompted the first regulations on fine particulate matter issued under the Clean Air Act in 1997. Manufacturers spent millions in an effort to dispute the science and called for release of the raw data, which the researchers, bound by a confidentiality agreement, refused. Today the findings are established science—and the rules they inspired will prevent more than 230,000 early deaths by 2020. Nevertheless, Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who chairs the science committee, has subpoenaed the EPA for the underlying Six Cities data. He has also unsuccessfully sponsored a bill, dubbed the Honest Act, which would bar the EPA from issuing any new rules based on such studies. Mr Pruitt’s recently announced proposal would sidestep Congress and impose such a policy anyway.

The consequences could be severe. The EPA cites 50,000 studies each year. The costs of redacting data that might identify people before publication could amount to $100m per year, according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, crowding out an already squeezed research budget. Air-quality rules and pesticide limits rely on analyses of confidential medical records—which Mr Pruitt may now label as suspect and try to undo.

The new policy is a costly solution in search of a problem. It is outlandish to think that scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy to exaggerate the health consequences of water and air pollution using fabricated data. It is less likely still that a member of the public browsing through the agency’s website would discover the fraud that had eluded peer reviewers. Some critics have credibly claimed that the EPA inflates the benefits of environment rules and downplays the costs. But the agency already publishes the details of its maths in the form of regulatory impact analyses, often hundreds of pages long, which are available for public scrutiny. Replicability and transparency are vital to science. But, as 985 scientists wrote in a letter to Mr Pruitt, the proposed restrictions are “phoney issues that weaponise ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decision-making, rather than genuinely address either.”

Mr Pruitt has already barred university scientists who receive federal grants from the EPA, as many leading researchers do, from sitting on boards advising the agency, on the ground of conflict of interest. He has no such qualms about scientists who work for industries regulated by the EPA, such as chemical manufacturers and coal producers. The result is that the number of university scientists on the boards has fallen by half, while the number from regulated industries or consulting companies has increased threefold. Michael Honeycutt, the new chief science adviser, has claimed that the dangers of mercury and ozone are exaggerated, and that “some studies even suggest that PM [particulate matter] makes you live longer”. Deborah Swackhamer, a professor of environmental policy, was demoted as head of the Board of Scientific Counsellors in favour of Paul Gilman, an executive at Covanta, a large waste-management firm.

Career staffers, usually do-gooder types, are dejected about Mr Pruitt, who has steadfastly committed himself to undoing as many Obama-era environmental regulations as he can. He has also proposed punishing budget cuts to the EPA, lopping off a quarter of its funding, though Congress has not yet agreed. More than 200 scientists left the agency in 2017; seven were hired. Three scientists were barred from speaking at a conference in October, and references to “global warming”, “fossil fuels” and “climate change” have been buried on the agency’s website. As a result of all this, the number of EPA employees has shrunk to the lowest level in decades. Other staffers are content to wait and outlast Mr Pruitt. “Career staff continue to keep our nose to the grindstone—with proper personal protective equipment and particulate controls,” jokes one bureaucrat.

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

The unusual process for staffing the White House [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:02:18 -0700

THE drama in the average congressional committee hearing makes Samuel Beckett’s plays look like fast-paced thrillers. But the afternoon session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23rd contained a genuinely exciting reversal. Reporters were prepared for the committee to deliver a historic rebuke and vote to recommend that Mike Pompeo should not be confirmed as secretary of state, something that has never happened before. Republicans hold a one-seat majority on the committee; Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, was expected to side with Democrats to protest against Mr Pompeo’s hawkishness. Moments before the committee convened, Mr Paul changed his mind, tweeting that he had “received assurances” the Mr Pompeo agrees that the Iraq war “was a mistake, that regime change has destabilised the region and that we must end our involvement with Afghanistan”. That cleared a path for his confirmation by the full Senate, filling a vacancy in the administration that was opened when President Donald Trump tweet-sacked Rex Tillerson on March 13th.

Mr Pompeo has held some undiplomatic positions: against the Iran deal and in favour of regime change in North Korea, for instance. Since being nominated he has modified both those views. But he has a personal rapport with Mr Trump, so up he rises. In office, his first task will be to rebuild. When Mr Tillerson left, around 40% of all Senate-confirmed positions at State lacked even a nominee; several top undersecretary posts sit vacant.

Elsewhere, though, Mr Trump’s administration is beset by the same old problems: lazy vetting and underpopulation. The Veterans Affairs department (VA) has been leaderless since Mr Trump fired David Shulkin on March 28th(the White House claims he resigned). Like several other top Trump administration officials, Mr Shulkin faced accusations of improperly billing the government for personal travel. He also clashed with the White House over plans to privatise veterans’ health care.

The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee was due to hold hearings on Ronny Jackson, whom Mr Trump nominated to replace Mr Shulkin, on April 25th. They have been delayed. Two days before the scheduled hearing, the committee received allegations that Mr Jackson drank excessively, overprescribed drugs and verbally abused colleagues. Many have defended him against the charges; one senator said Mr Jackson told him he never drank on duty.

Mr Jackson was a strange choice from the start. A navy admiral and Mr Trump’s personal doctor in the White House, he has never run a large organisation. His main qualifications seem to be his film-star looks and willingness to say nice things about Mr Trump on television. After the president’s physical in January, Mr Jackson said the president had “incredible genes”, “might live to be 200 years old…if he had a healthier diet” and “has a very unique ability to just get up in the morning and reset.”

Mr Trump’s very unique method for choosing nominees has already caused him problems. Andrew Puzder, the head of a restaurant chain, withdrew his nomination for labour secretary after allegations of domestic abuse (which he denies). Jason Miller withdrew from an appointment as communications director after reports that he had an affair with another member of the president’s campaign team.

Officially, the White House is standing by Dr Jackson, who says he looks forward to “answering everybody’s questions”. But as The Economist went to press, he appeared to be hanging on by the thinnest of threads. The accusations had grown more detailed and lurid; the White House was said to be preparing for his withdrawal. Mr Trump insists, though, that it is “totally his decision.”

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

The Supreme Court seems inclined to uphold the president’s travel ban [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:02:17 -0700

ONE year ago, stung by what he termed “ridiculous” judicial defeats for his travel ban and sanctuary city policies, Donald Trump tweeted, “see you in the Supreme Court!” On April 25th, Mr Trump followed through on that promise. Trump v Hawaii asks whether the third version of the president’s restrictions on travel from primarily Muslim countries is consistent with immigration law and the constitution. After lower courts repeatedly froze Mr Trump’s edicts for discriminating against Muslims, the travel ban found a friendlier audience among the nine justices.

First up at the podium was Noel Francisco, the solicitor-general. The latest restrictions, announced in September, were based on a “worldwide, multi-agency review”, he told the court, and applied to countries that fail to provide enough information to vet their travellers. The proclamation “omits the vast majority of the world”, he said, including the “vast majority of the Muslim world”. If the restrictions were a “Muslim ban” in disguise, they were “the most ineffective Muslim ban that one could possibly imagine”.

Justice Samuel Alito picked up this theme in a question to Neal Katyal, the lawyer representing the ban’s challengers. Would a reasonable observer really read Mr Trump’s proclamation, which applies to only 8% of the world’s Muslims and only five of 50 majority-Muslim countries, as a “Muslim ban”? Mr Katyal acknowledged that the text alone does not damn the travel rules. But the “circumstances around it”, he said, including Mr Trump retweeting missives from an anti-Islam hate group to his tens of millions of followers, show the true motive behind the ban.

The most telling question of the morning came from Justice Elena Kagan, who asked Mr Francisco if there would any legal problem with a vehemently anti-Semitic president who got his staff to draft a travel order banning Israelis from entering America. If his cabinet “honestly” thought there was a threat to national security from Israelis, Mr Francisco said, the president “would be allowed to follow that advice”. But it is quite unlikely that a president would do such a thing. Well, Justice Kagan pressed on, tongue almost imperceptibly in cheek, and drawing laughter in the courtroom, “this is a out-of-the-box kind of president in my hypothetical.”

Should courts really have the duty to assess “whether or not there is...a national exigency” that would permit a president to limit foreigners’ access to America, asked Justice Anthony Kennedy? Is Mr Trump’s proclamation really, as Mr Katyal characterised it, “a power no president in 100 years has exercised”?

Justice Neil Gorsuch, Mr Trump’s appointee, and Chief Justice John Roberts also voiced scepticism about the challengers’ case against the travel rules. On Mr Katyal’s theory, the chief intimated, a president who acts on advice to launch an air strike against Syria could be seen as “discriminat[ing] against a majority-Muslim country”—a ludicrous conclusion. And since Congress may not be “prescient enough” to write laws that address “any particular factual situation that might arise”, he said, courts should afford presidents a wide berth to curtail travel. A decision in this showdown over presidential power should arrive by the end of June.

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

America's tech regulator gets five new commissioners in one go [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:02:05 -0700

THE Federal Trade Commission, the agency responsible for data privacy and antitrust enforcement, had a staid 2017. Amazon’s $13.7bn acquisition of Whole Foods grocery chain sailed past it after a short review. No acquisitions made by Google or Facebook were examined, despite mounting concerns that tech giants are able to buy up new firms before they ripen into true competition. The FTC was short-staffed for most of the year: thanks to presidential foot dragging and partisan spats, just two out of five commissioners were in place. As The Economist went to press, the Senate was due to confirm five new commissioners at once, the first time that has happened.

The interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, may have proved tepid, but it saw lawmakers grappling with big questions for the first time: what exactly Facebook (and, by extension, its tech firm brethren) is, and what, if anything, should be done about the power it holds? The FTC’s new chairman, Joseph Simons, an antitrust lawyer who was chief of the commission’s competition bureau in the early 2000s, is well versed in these questions. He addressed them directly in his confirmation hearing, telling the Senate Commerce Committee that while big companies that provide high-quality services are fine, antitrust laws should be vigorously enforced if firms use anticompetitive means to get big or stay big.

If he wants to act upon that sentiment, Mr Simons will find support in the form of Rebecca Slaughter, the fifth and final nominee for commissioner. Ms Slaughter played a role in shaping the Democrats’ Better Deal campaign platform, which includes promises to regulate antitrust not solely on the basis of the price and output of firms’ products, but also on whether corporate practices “limit access to services, stifle innovation, or hinder the ability of small businesses and entrepreneurs to compete”. For firms with free products, such as Facebook and Google, such qualitative regulation could prove problematic.

The other seats will be filled by Rohit Chopra, a Democrat formerly of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Noah Phillips and Christine Wilson, Republicans. The commissioners start with a backlog of work. The FTC has yet to rule on the gigantic 2017 Equifax data breach, and is investigating whether Facebook’s provision of data to Cambridge Analytica violated a settlement agreement the firm made with the agency in 2011. Thomas Struble of R Street, a policy research non-profit, says the settlement required Facebook not to misrepresent either how much information third parties can get hold of, or how it verifies the privacy practices of those parties.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal hinges on these questions. The answers, and any penalties, are for the refurbished FTC to determine. Standard treatment for tech-company violations has merely been further settlement agreements, although Facebook’s existing agreement does come with financial penalties for violation that run into the trillions.

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

The assisted-dying movement gathers momentum in America [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:01:54 -0700

THREE years ago John Radcliffe, a jovial retired lobbyist in Hawaii, was diagnosed with terminal stage four colon and liver cancer. He has since undergone 60 rounds of chemotherapy but doctors suspect he has just six more months to live. His illness often leaves him feeling exhausted but, undeterred, he has spent the past few years pushing to pass one last bill: Hawaii’s “Our Care, Our Choice Act”, which allows doctors to assist terminally ill patients who wish to die. Earlier this month, as Mr Radcliffe beamed behind him in a colourful lei, Hawaii’s governor signed the bill into law making Hawaii the seventh American jurisdiction to approve an assisted-dying law.

Like the laws in California, Washington, Vermont, Colorado and Washington, DC, Hawaii’s law is modelled on legislation in Oregon, which was the first state to allow assisted dying, in 1997. It permits an adult, who two doctors agree has less than six months to live and is mentally sound, to request lethal medication. The most commonly used drug is secobarbital, a barbiturate that induces sleep and eventually death by slowing the brain and nervous system. It is usually prescribed in the form of about 100 capsules that must be individually opened and mixed into liquid—a process advocates say averts accidental overdoses. The patient must take the medication themselves, without aid, but they can choose when and where to do so. Death with Dignity, an Oregon-based pressure group, estimates that 90% of the recipients of this service end their lives at home.

Legislatures in 24 other states are considering similar bills this year. Most will flounder. In 2017, 27 states debated assisted dying. None approved it. Still, the right-to-die movement seems likely to gather momentum. Between 1997 and 2008, Oregon was the only state that allowed doctors to let some patients hasten their deaths. In the decade since, six other jurisdictions have legalised assisted dying, either through legislation or ballot initiatives. Advocates are hopeful that Nevada, New Jersey and Massachusetts might soon follow.

A few factors make such laws likely to continue spreading. The first is public support. In 1947, when Gallup, a polling group, first began conducting surveys on the issue, 37% of Americans thought a “doctor should be allowed to end a terminally ill patient’s life by painless means” if requested by the patient. Since 1990, between 64% and 75% have expressed support for doctor-assisted dying (see chart). The remaining objections are concentrated among the religiously observant, though Gallup finds that a narrow majority of weekly churchgoers support assisted dying.

Doctors have become more accepting of the notion too. An ethics report published by Medscape, a medical news website, in December 2016 found that 57% of doctors surveyed believed doctor-assisted death should be available to the terminally ill, up from 46% who thought so in 2010. While the American Medical Association, America’s largest association of physicians, remains opposed to the practice on the grounds that “physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer,” some state medical groups have dropped their opposition to the procedure.

Kim Callinan of Compassion & Choices, a pressure group, believes there are several reasons for the growth in support. Since the first Death with Dignity Act was implemented in Oregon, there has been no evidence of misuse or abuse. In the past few years several high-profile cases have drawn attention to the issue. Perhaps the best known is that of Brittany Maynard, a young Californian woman with terminal brain cancer, who fervently advocated for right-to-die laws until she ended her life in November 2014 in Oregon. The third factor is the ageing of the baby-boomer generation, which is America’s most populous. “They’re starting to see their parents experience horrible deaths, and are beginning to contemplate their own ends,” Ms Callinan says.

But even in places that have approved assisted-dying laws, accessing it can be problematic. The Washington, DC, Council approved an assisted-dying ordinance in 2016. But since the law was implemented in July 2017, not a single patient has been able to take advantage of it. Peg Sandeen, the executive director of Death with Dignity, the Oregon-based organisation, explains that until recently the law was in jeopardy. A panel of congresspeople sought to include an amendment in the recent omnibus funding bill that would have repealed it. That effort flopped, which advocates hope will assuage DC doctors’ worries. Second, the DC law has more stringent administrative requirements than those in other American jurisdictions. The health department there requires that doctors register on a database before providing medical aid-in-dying. Requests remain fairly rare—only 218 people requested prescriptions in Oregon in 2017 and 111 people ended their lives in California in the first six months after the law came into force—so some doctors might not think the extra bureaucracy worth it.

Mary Klein, a retired journalist who lives in Washington, DC, and has terminal ovarian cancer, said she has sought medical aid-in-dying from five different doctors to no avail. A few have told her that they think palliative care is sufficient. Ms Klein, who watched her stepmother die in a hospital while receiving pain medicine that made her incoherent, disagrees. “No one wants to be in intolerable pain – but just as important is self-determination. I want to die peacefully in my home surrounded by loved ones. I want to be lucid when I say goodbye to my wife.”

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

Marco Rubio offers his Trump-crazed party a glint of hope [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:01:52 -0700

THE episode that encapsulated the Republican establishment’s capitulation to Donald Trump had been planned as a repudiation of him. It was when Senator Marco Rubio, in a bid to salvage his sinking candidacy in the 2016 Republican primaries, suggested that Mr Trump had a small penis. Formerly known as a high-minded conservative, Mr Rubio also mocked the Republican front-runner’s hair and “orange” skin. “Donald Trump likes to sue people,” he told a crowd in Virginia, ahead of the round of primaries that more or less sealed Mr Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination. “He should sue whoever did that to his face.”

Two years on, Mr Rubio is plotting a more elevated response to the earthquake Mr Trump has triggered on the right. In an hour-long interview he describes his plan for a new “reform conservative movement” devoted to addressing the economic disruption and social disaffection that the president vigorously described. In offering himself as an optimistic Reaganite, Mr Rubio acknowledges that he missed the “anxiety and anger” Mr Trump tapped into. “I spent a tremendous amount of time focused on the opportunities I had as the son of a bartender and a maid in the past century,” he says. “I didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about what the bartender and the maid face today.”

The details of Mr Rubio’s new programme are unclear, but he suggests they will involve more interventions such as the increased child tax credit he inserted into the tax reform passed last year, and a provision for paid family leave he is working on now. He mulls the need for more public spending on technological research and for education reform, to prioritise vocational skills. He advocates a more flexible benefit system, to help the retraining of disrupted workers. Against the magnitude of America’s income inequality, such measures might seem modest. Yet from the lips of an orthodox Republican leader, they imply a serious reconsideration of the pre-eminent conservative ideals: a minimal government role in the economy and a related view of liberty as “freedom from” government interference. “Government has an essential role to play in buffering this transition,” he says. “If we basically say everyone is on their own and the market’s going to take care of it, we will rip the country apart, because millions of good hardworking people lack the means to adapt.” Economic liberty, in this retelling, becomes something the government is required to guarantee. It is the freedom to enjoy “the dignity of work”, says Mr Rubio. “There needs to be a conservative movement that addresses these realities.”

His implication that Republicans have found no good answer to the problems Mr Trump described is irrefutable. The president’s scheme to revive the 1970s economy through protectionism and deregulation is unrealistic, as Mr Rubio—who these days dares not criticise Mr Trump—cannot help but acknowledge. “The future is going to happen,” he says. “I have no problem with bringing back American car-manufacturing facilities, but, whether they’re American robots or Mexican robots, they’re going to be highly automated.” Most Republican congressmen meanwhile remain entranced by the limited-government shibboleths he has shaken off, as his fight over the tax bill revealed. Mr Rubio’s proposal, to double the tax credit to $2,000 per child and pay for it by making a small increase to the corporate rate his party wanted, was decried by some Republicans as socialism. The watered-down version they accepted, as the price of Mr Rubio’s support for the bill, excluded the poorest families. “There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers,” he says. “In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”

That shows how resistant Mr Rubio’s party will be to the changes he wants. “I’m a minority within a minority,” he says. Yet he is well-able to argue for them. Though not as astute as Ben Sasse or articulate as Ted Cruz, he is an engaging communicator with broad appeal. Social conservatives adore him; pro-life and spikily partisan, he is no mushy centrist. Yet he retains a boyish earnestness that even Democrats find endearing. His golden back-story, as a son of poor immigrants, helps with that—and looks more relevant now than ever. “My relatives are firefighters and nurses and teachers and electricians,” he says. “These are people who are not all that excited about the new economy.”

A big moment for Little Marco

The question, as always with Mr Rubio, is: how serious is he? He has a record of taking enlightened positions—in backing intelligent climate-change policy, for example, and in his more recent support for immigration reform—then ditching them when the wind changes. His pitch also carries hints of that flakiness. He claims to have tempered his erstwhile enthusiasm for trade and immigration; in reality, he has little to say about either. That, in turn, raises another familiar question: is Mr Rubio repudiating Mr Trump or capitulating to him? The timing of his pitch is suspicious. He says his rethink reflects the truths he learned on the trail. But that was over two years ago. It might also be seen as a belated realisation, by a bruised but still-ambitious Republican, that the party of Trump will not return to conservative verities soon.

Even so, that underlines how important it is that Mr Rubio sees this through. He is not the only Republican taking a leaf from the president’s playbook. Yet in contrast to Trump acolytes such as Senator Tom Cotton or Mike Pompeo, the incoming secretary of state, he is unlikely to trace the president’s steps from economic populism to ethno-nationalism. That is not only good in itself. It is also why, having no divisive rhetoric to fall back on, he might try hardest to find solutions to the problems Mr Trump highlighted. It is a lot to expect from a gifted politician with a history of disappointing. But he might be the best hope his party has.

United States

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG