Bush’s Midnight Regulations

So, like many of his predecessors, the Bush administration is pushing through a series of unchecked and unbalanced rules. These rules have wide implications, including lowering pollution control standards for power plants, allowing loaded weapons into national parks, opening wilderness area to oil and gas drilling, law enforcement would get greater surveillance authority; the list totals 25 in all. It is speculated that the Obama administration will have a difficult time reversing these regulations.

Via NPR:

This is a big day in obscure but powerful corners of the Bush administration. There are now 60 days until Jan. 20, when President Bush leaves office and President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in. By no coincidence, there’s also a law mandating a 60-day waiting period before any big, new federal regulations take effect. That means today is the deadline set by the Bush administration to get rules onto the books before the Democrats arrive.

This is sometimes called “midnight rule-making” — even if 60 days (or the 30-day waiting period for lesser rules) make for a long midnight.

President Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, set a timetable last May speeding up the regulatory process to beat the deadlines. It has hardly been mentioned at White House press briefings. Earlier this month, spokeswoman Dana Perino brushed aside a single query as to whether the Obama administration could undo the new regulations. Perino suggested this wouldn’t be necessary.

From Yahoo! News:

These de-facto laws are called “midnight rules” or “midnight regulations” because they happen at the end — or midnight period — of an administration. If the rules are published in the Federal Register by Friday, Nov. 21, they’ll be very hard for President-elect Obama to reverse when he gets into office.

And that’s the point. Sure, the administration had eight years to get a lot of this stuff accomplished. But according to senior research fellow at George Mason University, Veronique de Rugy, most midnight regulations “cater to special interests” and “that is why they are hurried into effect without the usual checks and balances.”

George Bush isn’t the first president to push through rules before the next guy can get in. Jimmy Carter gets that award. In fact, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert says Carter’s whirlwind of last-minute activity before Ronald Reagan took office is when the practice got named. “They became known as ‘midnight regulations,’ after the ‘midnight judges’ appointed by John Adams in the final hours of his presidency.”

The complete list of Bush’s midnight regulations can be found here.