A rare case of regulatory restraint

Insight on the News, July 15, 2002 by Sean Paige

In what well could be a first, a leading government agency with responsibility for public safety has recommended against--you read it right: against--heaping yet another safety mandate on the mountain of regulations already in place to ensure that accidents don't happen and that everyone in America can live happily ever after.

In a recent report to Congress, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recommended against requiring seat belts in most school buses. It actually suggested, in another possible first, that the cost of installing new belts didn't outweigh the benefits. Lap belts on school buses were found to have "little, if any, benefit" in reducing serious or fatal injuries in serious head-on collisions, the NHTSA reported, and in some cases actually might increase the risk of injury to small children.

Redesigning school-bus seats to accommodate safety belts would reduce passenger capacity by 17 percent, studies indicated, and add $50 per seat to the cost of a new bus, or about $100 million. Those costs, combined with the probability that some safety belts would be used improperly, actually increasing risks to children, did not outweigh the potential benefits of saving an estimated one life per year, the NHTSA determined.

Although such cost-benefit appraisals may appear cold and even calculating, they are essential in a world of limited resources and necessary trade-offs. The Bush administration has underscored the point by bringing in John Graham, founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the White House. In that capacity, Graham essentially regulates the regulators, reviewing proposed new rules from agencies and rejecting those for which sound analysis is lacking.

Proposed regulations that don't pass muster with OIRA receive a "return letter," forcing the agency from which they came either to drop the proposed rule or do the analysis--including costs versus benefits--necessary to justify it. Graham's office has issued about 20 return letters to agencies in the 10 months he has been on the job. That is more than the total number issued by that same office in eight years of the Clinton administration.