White House threatens to veto Republican effort to hinder EPA

The Obama administration on Wednesday threatened to veto a Republican bill it says would significantly undermine the EPA's ability to regulate certain types of toxins by blocking landmark rules under the Clean Air Act and creating excessive bureaucracy.

The bill, which would require the creation of a special committee to analyze EPA rules and regulations, is expected to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday. The Senate, controlled by Democrats, is not expected to pass the measure.

Introduced by Oklahoma Republican John Sullivan, the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation (TRAIN) Act, was amended to include provisions that would block regulations curbing soot, smog and mercury pollution.

"While the Administration strongly supports careful analysis of the economic effects of regulation, the approach taken in (this bill) would slow or undermine important public health protections," the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a formal statement recommending Mr. Obama veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

The amendments to the initial bill amount to "a Trojan horse for a fundamental attack on the Clean Air Act," and would cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives, said Franz Matzner, the climate and air legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a New York based environmental advocacy organization.

"The leopard has revealed its spots and [the amended bill] is now just a straight-up rollback of the Clean Air Act," Matzner said

Additional amendments in the bill seek to further extend mandatory delays on implementing regulatory standards, and fundamentally change the way the EPA would set health-based standards. One, introduced by Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, would mandate that "in establishing any national primary or secondary ambient air quality standard under section 109 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7409), the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency shall take into consideration feasibility and cost."

"For the first time ever, it would change the Clean Air Act so that standards that are supposed to protect health are not based on science and medical opinion but on costs" - Matzner said, which he argued "is the same as your health insurance companies telling doctors they're not even allowed to tell you if you have cancer if the insurance company thinks treating you would be too expensive."

The White House defended the importance of the Clean Act in its statement, noting that "forty years of success have demonstrated that strong environmental protections and strong economic growth go hand in hand."

Republicans, meanwhile, charge that environmental regulations curb economic growth.

Matzner praised the veto threat, calling it the "right call" after Mr. Obama earlier this month overruled his own EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and asked her agency to withdraw its proposal for tougher ozone standards.