Perspective

Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” contains some admirable goals, including attacking the budget deficit, streamlining government, and cutting red tape. Hidden in the fine print, however, lurks a radical—and dangerous—anti-environment agenda. On examining the package, one can only conclude that the new leadership either doesn’t believe those polls showing that a vast majority of Americans want to protect the environment, or believes the public somehow won’t notice that the law would virtually shut down environmental regulation. This seems a risky gamble for Republicans intent on serving out their soon-to-be-limited terms.

The “Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act” now being debated in Congress contains many provisions aimed explicitly at blocking or miring in the courts any government rules to which industry and commercial interests object. Among the many mechanisms for accomplishing this end are:

•Requiring an extremely detailed, complicated, and costly analysis—including a 23-part “regulatory impact assessment,” a “cost-benefit analysis,” and a “risk assessment”—of almost any proposed rule, no matter how small;

•Creating “peer review panels”—with industry representation—to review and approve (or veto) these studies;

•Explicitly allowing companies to sue the government in response to these studies, even before the rule is published;

•Giving private property owners the right to be compensated for any regulation or government action that reduces the value of his or her property by 10%—this would be far in excess of what any court has interpreted as “takings.”

This proposed law is built on a strong mistrust of big government, which many Americans share. In the details, however, one discovers that to support it one must have nearly total trust in corporate America’s commitment to protect the public’s health, welfare, and environment. Executives at a few companies may be worthy of this role, but the companies themselves are money-making entities first, and bottom-line profits are all-too-often at odds with environmental and health safeguards. Congressional efforts to put industry in control of the public “commons” are disturbingly like setting the fox to watch the chicken coop. It would be quite a feat to slip these measures by the “green majority.”