Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs: A Discussion of Policymaking Opportunities and Constraints

Congressional research reportFeb 10, 2011

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Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs:

A Discussion of Policymaking Opportunities

and Constraints

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February 10, 2011

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CRS Report for Congress

Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs

Summary

A policymaker making a decision on approving a program may face the questions, What are the

tradeoffs? What alternatives are foregone by committing resources to that program? This issue

has been sharpened in environmental, health, and safety policy because studies indicate that some

programs are more cost-effective than others, suggesting that redirecting resources from less

efficient to more effective programs would increase overall national economic welfare.

Actually making implied tradeoffs has proved difficult, however. One reason is continuing

controversy over methods for evaluating the risks, costs, and benefits of alternative programs—

leaving uncertainty about exactly what would be gained and lost in a tradeoff. Other constraints

affecting tradeoffs include variations in regulatory standards among environmental, health, and

safety statutes and political responses to nonquantifiable values such as equity. Legislative efforts

to revise the statutes or to establish more comprehensive reviews of tradeoffs have moved slowly.

Two further factors constrain the ability to make a tradeoff at a particular time and in a particular

institutional context. One consists of institutional structures and procedures that impose limits on

possible ranges of decisions within the legislative and executive branches. For example, an

appropriations subcommittee typically weighs spending tradeoffs only among programs within its

jurisdiction, but not tradeoffs with programs in the jurisdiction of other subcommittees even if the

programs are related. Similarly, statutes authorizing environmental, health, and safety regulations

may be written by separate committees, leading to variations in cost-effectiveness standards for

protecting the public health and environment.

A second complicating factor occurs when a program’s alternative(s) would require a shift in who

can decide on the use of the resources involved, as when a regulatory program is considered in

lieu of a tax-supported program. Deciding to regulate industrial air pollutants mandates spending

by industry and consumers; choosing not to regulate leaves those monies available to the

industry’s executives and consumers, who can invest/spend them according to their own

preferences. Having little control over alternative expenditures, a decisionmaker tends to focus on

each program as self-contained, not to compare options.

The actual tradeoff faced by a legislator or policymaker at a particular time and place is

constrained by institutional structure and rules, and by the fact that most decisions are up-ordown, not between program options. Many putative tradeoffs exist only in a theoretical sense:

they are tradeoffs not then and there available to that policymaker. Making environmental, health,

and safety tradeoffs on the basis of cost-benefit analyses implies restructuring decisionmaking

processes, but such restructuring is very difficult in itself, and it is unclear whether the results

would more accurately reflect the informed preferences of Congress—or the citizenry.

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Contents

Preface........................................................................................................................................1

Institutional and Structural Limits on Choosing among Tradeoffs ................................................4

Appropriations for Federal Programs.....................................................................................5

Authorizations for Federal Programs .....................................................................................7

Coordinating or Centralizing Decisionmaking for Tradeoffs ..................................................9

Federal Decision Criteria, State and Local Choices, and Private Sector Preferences: When

Tradeoffs Change Decisionmakers Controlling Resources ...................................................... 11

Weighing Tradeoffs: Where Does It Lead? ................................................................................ 14

Figures

Figure 1. Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs .............................................................. 17

Tables

Table 1. Congressional Committee Jurisdiction for Selected Environmental, Health, and

Safety Statutes .........................................................................................................................8

Table 2. Decisionmakers and Decisionmaking Criteria Determining Regulatory

Expenditures to Abate Pollution ............................................................................................. 12

Contacts

Author Contact Information ...................................................................................................... 18

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Preface

Government programs are no exception to the constraints of opportunity costs: that is, investing

resources in any one program means that those resources cannot be used for some other program.

A policymaker deciding whether to support a new action; a legislator deciding whether to vote for

a new program; a regulator deciding whether to impose a stringent standard: each decisionmaker

faces the question, What will be foregone if I decide to commit the resources for this activity?

Especially with respect to environmental, health, and safety programs, increasing sensitivity to

the costs of regulations has led some pundits, analysts, and stakeholders to challenge initiatives

on the grounds that alternative choices are available that would provide more risk reduction or

other benefits at lower cost.

Background Note

The original version of this report was prepared in the mid-1990s when regulatory reform and the budget were highprofile congressional issues. CRS was receiving numerous requests in the general format of, “If regulatory program X

were rescinded, how much of some other good Y (e.g., mammograms) could we buy?” The theoretical answer is a

relatively straightforward calculation and may give a sense of relative benefits. But in most cases the answer has little

practical application for actually redirecting dollars from program X to program Y: this report examined why.

Given the probability that regulatory programs and budgetary constraints will again be high-profile for the 112th

Congress, similar questions are likely to arise. This report has therefore been updated and reissued. While many of

the examples are from earlier years, the principles examined remain the same.

When Congress voted on the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, columnist George F. Will

wrote, “Policy makers face difficult tradeoffs. Comparative returns to health must be considered.

The $21 billion spent on cleaner air cannot be spent on immunization, infant mortality, care for

poor pregnant women.”1

At a 1997 hearing concerning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposal to tighten

the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter, a

Congressman commented, “What are the alternatives to the ... rulemaking? There are clearly

better investments that can be made to promote public health. Eight billion dollars could save 3 or

4 times as many women from breast cancer by paying for mammograms.”2

In a “viewpoint” article in Exxon’s magazine for shareholders, its author states that sound science

and sound economics could lead to smarter regulation by reallocating regulatory expenditures: for

example, “it may be smart to invest more in smoking-cessation education for pregnant women

and less in making the groundwater in a Michigan rail yard cleaner than drinking water.”3

George F. Will, “Your Money and Your Life,” Washington Post (March 8, 1990), p. A27.

Hon. David McIntosh, in U.S. Congress, House, Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources,

and Regulatory Affairs, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, EPA’s Particulate Matter and Ozone

Rulemaking: Is EPA above the Law? Hearing, 105th Congress, 1st session, April 16, 1997 [Serial No. 105-37]

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1997), p. 36.

“Bringing Reason to Regulation,” The Lamp (Winter 1997-1998), 13.

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In a debate counterposing environmental and economic tradeoffs, Paul Portney of Resources for

the Future said, “A hundred dollars spent on environmental protection is $100 that can’t be spent

on housing, or space, or health, or other alternatives.”4

In 1992 Stephen Breyer (who became a Supreme Court Justice in 1994) addressed the need to

improve the effectiveness of risk regulation in The Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures, given at

Harvard. His solution featured a centralized administrative group in the federal government to

oversee and guide risk regulation. One of the group’s missions could be to

create a “risk agenda” … that looks for tradeoffs among programs that will lead overall to

improved health or safety. It might, for example, look for practical ways to settle some toxic

waste dump cases, thereby obtaining funds that might be used to help pay for vaccinations,

or prenatal care, or mammograms.... It might, in other words, look for ways to reallocate,

transfer, or combine health resources so that they perform more effectively. 5

In the early 1990s the then-head of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, John D. Graham,

together with his student and colleague Tammy O. Tengs, went beyond the rhetoric and studied

these potential tradeoffs. They analyzed the cost-effectiveness of 185 life-saving interventions

(including, for example, laws, regulations, and building codes) for which national cost and benefit

estimates were available. They found that these interventions cost $21.4 billion per year and

averted 56,700 premature deaths and saved 592,000 years of life annually; but there was no

relationship between the cost-effectiveness of the interventions and their implementation. Tengs

and Graham concluded that if the $21.4 billion per year were devoted only to the most efficient

interventions, approximately twice as many lives and years of life could be saved. Alternatively,

they found that the nation could maintain the current level of survival benefits—averting 56,700

deaths per year—and “save $31.1 billion over the status quo, because there are many untapped

investment opportunities that save both lives and money. That is, not only would we save the

$21.4 billion that we are currently spending, but another $10 billion—all the while maintaining

our present level of survival benefits.”6

Graham asserted that failing to follow through on the implications of studies showing that

tradeoffs could improve the cost-effectiveness of health, environmental, and safety regulations

was a “perverse pattern of investment [that] amounts to ‘statistical murder’ of American

citizens.”7 Graham concluded—

Legislators should pass broad-based legislation requiring the use of risk analysis and costbenefit analysis in government decisions. The President and Congress should reexamine

Paul R. Portney, representing the economist’s perspective in a debate Does Environmental Policy Conflict with

Economic Growth? Two Views, Resources for the Future (1 December 1993); a printed version is David Gardiner and

Paul R. Portney, “Does Environmental Policy Conflict with Economic Growth?” Resources (Spring 1994, no. 115),

pp. 19-23

Stephen Breyer, Breaking the Vicisous Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Tammy O. Tengs and John D. Graham, “The Opportunity Costs of Haphazard Social Investments in Life-Saving,” in

Robert W. Hahn, ed., Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation (Washington, D.C.: The

AEI Press, 1996), pp. 173-174; Tammy Tengs, et al., “Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and Their CostEffectiveness,” Risk Analysis, Vol. 15, no. 3 (1995), 369-390. For an explicit critique of the analysis, see Lisa

Heinzerling, “Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and Their Misuse in the Debate Over Regulatory Reform,” Risk

Vol. 13, no. 1/ 2 (Spring 2002), 151-175.

John D. Graham, “Comparing Opportunities To Reduce Health Risks: Toxin Control, Medicine and Injury

Protection,” National Center for Policy Analysis, Policy Report No. 192 (June 1995), p. 2.

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annual appropriations to public health and environmental agencies to determine how

reallocations of dollars could offer more health protection and no greater costs to the

taxpayer or private sector.

This view has been broadly accepted among those promoting risk assessment and cost-benefit

analysis as ways of rationalizing regulatory activities. For example, summarizing a volume

analyzing risk-benefit tradeoffs, Robert W. Hahn, a long-time student of regulatory costs,

concluded: “We could save a substantial number of lives and money by reallocating resources

from ineffective domestic regulations to other life-saving interventions in the United States or the

developing world.”8 Similarly, legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed that studies like Tengs’ and

Graham’s create “a presumption that the current system of regulation suffers from serious

misallocation of resources.”9 Sunstein has promoted cost-benefit analysis as a way to require

people “to look globally at the consequences of apparently isolated actions.”10

Thus, going beyond rhetoric, analysts like Hahn and Tengs and Graham see quantitative analysis

of tradeoffs as a practical way of achieving greater societal efficiency for health, safety, and

environmental protection investments. Graham, in particular, has been a strong advocate of using

risk and cost-benefit assessments of tradeoffs to improve decisionmaking11—a view which he

was in a position to further between 2001 and 2006 as Administrator of the Office of Information

and Regulatory Affairs in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. And Cass

Sunstein likewise has had, since 2009, the opportunity to apply his views on rationalizing

regulation with cost-benefit analysis as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory

Affairs in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for the Obama Administration.

Certainly, risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses of health, safety, and environmental policies

have advanced substantially over the past several years, leading to efforts at quantifying tradeoffs

to identify the most efficient/least efficient ones. But legislators and other policymakers have

found it difficult to effect overt tradeoffs among environmental, health, and safety programs. One

reason for this difficulty, and perhaps the one most often cited, is the perceived inadequacy of the

assessments themselves. Problematic issues include incomplete assessment of costs and,

especially, benefits; discounting future benefits; monetization of noncommercial benefits such as

health and environmental amenities; the resources and time necessary to conduct analyses; and a

utilitarian bias to the technique, among others.12

Robert W. Hahn, “Regulatory Reform: What Do the Government’s Numbers Tell Us?” in Robert W. Hahn, ed., Risks,

Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1996), p. 239.

Cass Sunstein, Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment (Cambridge University Press (2002), p. 31.

Ibid., p. 40.

E.g., Graham, “Edging Toward Sanity on Regulatory Risk Reform,” Issues in Science and Technology (Summer

1995), 61-66; Graham, “Legislative Approaches to Achieving More Protection Against Risk at Less Cost,” University

of Chicago Legal Forum (1997), 1-47; testimony on provisions of H.R. 9 [104th Congress] that would create a system

of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis for Federal agencies engaged in health, safety, and environmental

regulations: Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Analysis (104th

Cong., 1st sess.) January 3, 1995 [No. 3] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1995), pp. 69-71.

E.g., for a review of the difficulties in applying these techniques, see Lester B. Lave, “Benefit-Cost Analysis: Do the

Benefits Exceed the Costs?” in Robert W. Hahn, ed., Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from

Regulation (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1996), pp. 104-134; Lisa Heinzerling, “The Perils of Precision,” The

Environmental Forum (September/October 1998), 38-43; and Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless: On

Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (New Press, 2004).

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But leaving aside a more detailed discussion of how accurately it is possible to evaluate potential

tradeoffs, or how fair such tradeoffs might be,13 this report examines two institutional reasons

why policymakers may be disinclined to make tradeoffs—or may even find it impossible. For

even if the tradeoffs can be defined and defended, difficulties in effectuating them remain. One

institutional barrier is the limited authority of policymakers to affect decisions across institutional

boundaries. For example, in part because of independent decisions made at different times by the

relevant congressional committees of jurisdiction, the various health, safety, and environmental

statutes manifest differing standards of acceptable risk and differing criteria for assessing them.

The second barrier arises from the divergence in decision criteria applied by the different

institutional decisionmakers involved in tradeoffs. Health, safety, and environmental policies can

involve both public financing (e.g., appropriated grants or loans) and regulations that require

private sector investments; they can involve a range of federal, state, local, and private

decisionmakers. As tradeoffs change those responsible for making decisions, the bases for acting

or financing programs shift as well. A decisionmaker can rarely if ever prescribe that resources

freed up by his or her not supporting an environmental protection program or not choosing a

regulatory option—or a more stringent option—will go to a more beneficial alternative.

These constraints that arise from institutional contexts in which legislators and other

policymakers address tradeoffs both limit alternatives that can usefully be considered, and tend to

push decisionmakers to make up-or-down, case-by-case decisions rather than choosing among

tradeoffs. Typically, a decisionmaker’s only option is to approve or disapprove an action, to vote

for or against a program, or to implement or delay a regulation—with little power to redirect the

resources to a more cost-effective alternative if the choice at hand is rejected.

Institutional and Structural Limits on Choosing

among Tradeoffs

The rules and structures of organizations channel decisions in ways that limit the options of

decisionmakers. In Congress, rules of procedures and committee structures can limit tradeoffs

available to Members. In particular, jurisdictional limitations affecting congressional

subcommittees’ and committees’ choices and procedural requirements governing floor actions—

including especially the “germaneness” rule of the House14—impede treating comprehensively

the many environmental, health, and safety statutes. These procedural and structural limits play

key roles in determining the availability of potential tradeoffs both among program goals and

among alternatives for federal expenditures of treasury funds. Similarly, procedures and the

bureaucratic structure of the executive branch limit choices of administrators and program

managers.

Stakeholders affected by regulations and tradeoffs are likely to weigh in on deliberations by policymakers,

potentially skewing perceptions of impacts and of fairness. See, e.g., Cass Sunstein, Risk and Reason, pp. 91-95, 113114.

“No motion or proposition on a subject different from that under consideration shall be admitted under color of

amendment.” Clause 7 of rule XVI of the rules of the House of Representatives. Thus an amendment substituting

language concerning, say, a health program for an environmental action could be subject to a point of order as not

germane, thereby putting at risk any effort to trade off among unrelated health, safety and environmental programs.

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Appropriations for Federal Programs

The process by which Congress considers annual appropriations illustrates how structure can

constrain tradeoffs. While the President, Congress as a whole, each Chamber, and the full

Committees on Budget and on Appropriations have the ability to view comprehensively funding

priorities and consider tradeoffs, only in exceptional cases can those with comprehensive

authority devote attention to the level of detail at which most environmental, health, and safety

tradeoffs occur.15

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees16 each divide the total amount of funds

available for discretionary spending among their subcommittees (12 since the 109th Congress;

previously, 13). These 302(b) allocations, as they are known, set the funding limit for each

subcommittee handling one of the 12 bills annually appropriating funds for the federal

government. As a practical matter, most tradeoffs among programs—whether to spend dollars

here or there—occur within each subcommittee’s jurisdiction. 17 For example, the Subcommittee

on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies has combined responsibility for the Department

of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Forest Service, the Indian Health

Service, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. The

subcommittee may make judgments on the best use of a dollar within an agency’s appropriation,

or across agencies within its domain—so that EPA’s dollars may be affected by appropriations

decisions concerning Interior or the Forest Service, for example. Thus the ability to weigh the

effectiveness of funds to be spent on water quality, for example, could balance EPA and

Department of the Interior water programs, since they are under the jurisdiction of one

appropriations subcommittee; but there would not be the ability to comparatively weigh the

effectiveness of water programs managed by the Department of Agriculture, which is under the

jurisdiction of a different subcommittee. Thus an option of spending money through the USDA

for water pollution control is only theoretically an opportunity cost of a choice to spend money on

sewage treatment grants through EPA: those choosing to spend the money through EPA did not

have the option of spending those dollars through USDA. For an actual example, see the textbox

“Clean Water Initiative Tradeoff.”

At many steps of congressional (and administration) decisionmaking, Members implicitly or explicitly tradeoff

programs, issues, and/or funding. But, as measured by cost benefit analyses and risk assessments such as Tengs and

Graham’s, some environmental, health, and safety programs empirically seem relatively inefficient compared to other

programs. The question addressed here, then, is why has the purported identification of superior tradeoffs not led to

changes resulting in a potentially more efficient array of programs.

For more details, see CRS Report 97-684, The Congressional Appropriations Process: An Introduction, by (name

redacted), and CRS Report RS20144,Allocations and Subdivisions in the Congressional Budget Process, by (name redact

ed); also, Richard Munson,The Cardinals of Capitol Hill (New York: Grove Press, 1993).

The Office of Management and Budget, which constructs the President’s Budget, is analogously split into

compartments, each of which focuses on tradeoffs within its allotment of the full budget.

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Clean Water Initiative Tradeoff

To illustrate, in 1997 the Administration proposed a Clean Water Initiative to improve and strengthen water

pollution control efforts. EPA and USDA, working with other agencies, developed a coordinated action plan. To

implement the plan, the President proposed a total of $568 million in increases for various water programs in the

FY1999 budget. However, these programs were under the jurisdictions of five separate subcommittees of each

chamber’s Appropriations Committee, so “there is no single opportunity for making funding tradeoffs where the

several agencies are concerned, e.g., more for USDA, less for EPA.”18 In the end, each subcommittee weighed its

component of the plan against its own priorities, so each agency’s program was treated separately. EPA’s programs

got most of their proposed increases, while most of USDA’s programs did not. The “coordinated action” of the plan

was lost.19

The competition among alternatives is not just on the basis of relative costs and benefits: there is

also political reality. In an interview about federal research and development, Senator Bennett

Johnston was asked about R & D tradeoffs among departments. Johnston observed:

There is no research budget as such. So what happens at National Science Foundation, the

National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy are not connected to each other.

You know, those silly scientists who said kill the SSC [Superconducting Super Collider] so

there would be more money for something else. They did not fail economics 101, they failed

freshman high school arithmetic. I mean [the budget process] just does not work that way.20

Similarly, when an Appropriations subcommittee proposed cutting the NASA budget by $1

billion in the late 1990s, a commentator said:

Researchers unable to imagine their own discipline ever being graced with billion dollar

budgets in the first place may simply shrug, or even smile. Some may even think that less

money spent on space means more money on some worthier form of research. They’d be

flying in the face of decades of experience, but then that’s optimism for you.21

These bounded tradeoffs become explicit in floor amendments to add funds in an appropriations

bill: as net dollars within the bill cannot exceed a ceiling, offsetting funds must be found

elsewhere in the bill, so tradeoffs typically are restricted to programs within the subcommittee’s

jurisdiction. For an example from 1998, when there were 13 appropriations subcommittees, see

the textbox, “Tradeoff Within a Subcommittee.”

Tradeoff Within a Subcommittee

For example, during consideration of H.R. 4194, in the 105th Congress, the FY1999 appropriations bill for the

Departments of Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies (including EPA and

NASA), an amendment was approved by the House to increase VA grants to construct state extended care facilities

by $21 million and offset the increase from the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS program funding. An

alternative amendment, which was withdrawn, would have offset the $21 million increase for VA extended care

facilities with a decrease in Space Station funding. Thus funds originally allocated to a HUD AIDS program were

traded off to VA, in lieu of an alternative proposal that they come from funds originally allocated to the Space Station.

In this way tradeoffs are typically contained within each of the appropriations bills.

CRS Report 98-745, Clean Water Action Plan: Budgetary Initiatives, by (name redacted), p. 4. [Not in print;

available from the author.]

In theory, either full Appropriations Committee could have addressed the funding comprehensively, but more often

would defer to subcommittee decisions.

The Energy Daily (Jan. 25, 1994), p. 4.

Oliver Morton, “Life without NASA,” New Scientist (August 21, 1999), p. 45.

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Authorizations for Federal Programs

The situation is analogous for authorizations of programs—that is, the statutes that establish their

intent, rules, and limitations: jurisdictions are divided among committees (and their

subcommittees). For environmental, health, and safety statutes, tradeoffs are largely determined

by the statutes/programs of the subcommittee/committee of jurisdiction. 22 Opportunities for

tradeoffs across committee jurisdictional lines can be limited, especially in the House.

At one level, legislative constraints hinder consideration of tradeoffs between regulatory impacts

of programs; an example is the separate jurisdictions in the House for air pollution (Committee on

Energy and Commerce) and water pollution (Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure). At

the level of choosing between policy instruments, jurisdiction also has implications. Although

most economists and many other policy analysts believe pollution reductions could be more

efficiently achieved through economic mechanisms, such as pollution taxes, than through

“command and control” regulations, the latter have been most often chosen. This tradeoff is

constrained in large part because of split jurisdictional authorities. The committees establishing

pollution control programs and policies can authorize regulations but cannot levy taxes. Adoption

of pollution taxes would depend on favorable action by the House Ways and Means Committee—

an added step with uncertain outcome that the authorizing committee can avoid by employing

regulations only.23 Jurisdiction can also affect choices between regulatory programs and federally

funded programs. Authorizing committees can authorize regulatory programs themselves. But

when they authorize federally funded programs, the final funding decisions reside with the

appropriations committees, whose priorities on such programs may differ from the authorizing

committees’ priorities.24 One way authorizing committees have effected their view of the

appropriate funding priority for their programs is to establish entitlement programs, which are not

subject to annual appropriations.

Tengs and Graham tried to take institutional constraints into account in their assessment of costeffective alternatives. They analyzed savings achievable if five government agencies25 each

independently invested its regulatory efforts most cost-effectively. The analysis examined 134

agency rules that result in about $4.11 billion spent per year by those regulated and save 94,000

life-years. In the analysis, the marginal cost per life-year saved by each agency’s regulations

varied from $1,510,000 for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to $11,300 for the National

Highway Traffic Safety Administration, but the more cost-effective application of those dollars

within each agency’s regulatory authorities would mean that the $4.11 billion in resource

consumption would nearly double the life-years saved, to about 180,000.26

But even this agency-by-agency assessment of tradeoffs does not fully reflect the limitations on

tradeoffs—especially for EPA. EPA’s authorities derive from over a dozen statutes. Jurisdiction

David C. King, Turf Wars: How Congressional Committees Claim Jurisdiction (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1997).

See Steven Kelman, What Price Incentives? (Boston: Auburn House Publishing Co., 1981).

Authorizing committees frequently specify annual appropriations for a program; for the appropriations committees,

however the authorization for appropriation is in effect a ceiling with actual funding subject to available monies and

competing programs.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Agency, the

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Tengs and Graham, p. 176.

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over these statutes is divided among several committees in the House; while jurisdiction over

environmental laws is considerably more concentrated in the Senate, jurisdictional splits remain.

Table 1 presents the House and Senate Committees that are among those with jurisdictions over

selected environmental, health, and safety statutes. While this list may not capture all relevant

committees with jurisdiction, it illustrates that programs often cited as candidates for tradeoffs are

subject to separate legislative panels. One result is that each act containing regulatory programs

has its own criteria for decisions on setting standards, cleanup, etc. With strong leadership,

negotiations may lead to cross-committee deals to coordinate program authorities, but this is the

exception, not the rule.

Table 1. Congressional Committee Jurisdiction for Selected

Environmental, Health, and Safety Statutes

Environmental, Health, and

Safety Statutes

House Committee of

Jurisdiction

Senate Committee of

Jurisdiction

Clean Air Act

Energy and Commerce

Environment and Public Works

Clean Water Act

Transportation and Infrastructure

Environment and Public Works

Safe Drinking Water Act

Energy and Commerce

Environment and Public Works

Solid Waste Disposal Act/Resource

Conservation and Recovery Act

Energy and Commerce

Environment and Public Works

Superfund

Energy and Commerce;

Transportation and Infrastructure;

Ways and Means (taxes)

Environment and Public Works;

Finance (taxes)

Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and

Rodenticide Act

Agriculture;

Energy and Commerce (food

tolerances)

Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry;

Commerce, Science, and

Transportation (food tolerances)

Toxic Substances Control Act

Energy and Commerce

Environment and Public Works

Occupational Safety and Health Act

Education and the Workforce

Health, Education, Labor and

Pensions

Food and Drug Act

Energy and Commerce

Commerce, Science, and

Transportation

Note: This table simplifies many jurisdictional complexities. The identified committees may not have exclusive

jurisdiction over the indicated statutes, and some committees with jurisdiction extending over environmental,

health, and safety statutes may not be included. Subcommittee jurisdictions are omitted. Also, specific provisions

in a bill may lead to multiple referral to other committees for consideration of those provisions. Finally, some

programs have elements that may be affected by separate legislative enactments, such as mass transit programs

under transportation legislation having consequences for Clean Air Act programs.

Thus both legislators and EPA officials have limited opportunities to compare and make

consistent standards and decision criteria among statutes. The resulting fragmented regulatory

structure precludes EPA from proceeding with many putative tradeoffs and from weighing the

costs and benefits decisions under different authorities on the same scales. Hence, at least for

EPA, Tengs and Graham’s analysis showing that regulatory actions could be more cost effective

appears to be more conceptual and hortatory than implementable. EPA has some power to

comprehensively assess the effectiveness of its programs, but the existing statutory patchwork

that shapes EPA’s administrative structure27 goes far to explain the variability in the cost27

Concluding that coordinated decisions among the programs can scarcely be achieved without changes in the

authorizing statutes and their diverse standards for decisionmaking, some analysts have proposed combining EPA’s

(continued...)

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effectiveness of its many programs—at least as measured by available cost-benefit analyses and

risk assessments.

Coordinating or Centralizing Decisionmaking for Tradeoffs

Both Congress and the White House have tried to bring more coherence and rigor to regulatory

decisionmaking. A series of executive orders over the past 40-plus years have led to a process for

assessing the impacts of regulatory proposals (most recently, President Clinton’s E.O. 12866, with

new implementing guidelines issued by the George W. Bush Administration). Congress has

sought, with mixed success, to impose risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis requirements on

the regulatory agencies, and to provide some centralized oversight of the process: the Unfunded

Mandates Reform Act (P.L. 104-4) requires agencies to prepare cost-benefit analyses for

regulations costing $100 million or more—in effect codifying a part of E.O. 12866. However, in

some cases statutory language prohibits the consideration of costs in regulatory decisions.28

Agency-by-agency attention to the effectiveness of regulations has been heightened by the

Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA, P.L. 103-62), as well.

Writing in 1995, Graham, along with Jonathan Baert Wiener, discussed possible reforms “to

enable and impel decisionmakers to pursue a more comprehensive analysis of risk.”29 They made

proposals concerning Congress,30 the judiciary,31 and the executive branch. For the executive

branch, Wiener and Graham suggested more forceful implementation by the Office of

Information and Regulatory Affairs of the executive orders requiring cost and risk analysis (E.O.

(...continued)

diverse statutory authorities into one comprehensive “organic act.” This idea was explored in “Integrated Pollution

Control: A Symposium”—but while the contributors raised the issue of EPA’s structure in constraining consistent

decisions across media, they did not consider the implications of the committee structure of Congress. The multiple

committee jurisdictions make integrating risk reductions, as envisioned by an EPA “organic act,” difficult. See Frances

H. Irwin, “An Integrated Framework for Preventing Pollution and Protecting the Environment” and David Clarke,

“Chasing Rainbows: Is an Integrated Statute the Pot of Gold for Environmental Policy?” Environmental Law, Vol. 22,

no. 1 (1992), 1-76 and 281-300.

E.g., in the setting of National Ambient Air Quality Standards; decision by the Supreme Court, Whitman v. American

Trucking Associations, Inc. 531 U.S. 457 (2001).

In Jonathan Baert Wiener and John D. Graham, eds., Risk versus Risk (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,

1995), p. 243. For the ensuing discussion, see pp. 246-265.

For example, they proposed that a risk tradeoff analysis be required at some stage of the legislative process; it would

be conducted by staff of a relevant committee or by one of the congressional support agencies. See also Timur Kuran

and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 51 (April 1999), p. 752,

for a proposal that Congress “create a [congressional] risk regulation committee that would be entrusted with compiling

information about a wide range of risk levels and helping to produce priorities. This committee would have authority

over both substantive statutes and the appropriations process.” In the 105th Congress, legislation (H.R. 1704) was

proposed in the House that would have created a congressional office “to provide the Committee on Government

Reform and Oversight ... information that will assist the committee in the discharge of all matters within its jurisdiction,

including information with respect to its jurisdiction over authorization and oversight of the Office of Information and

Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget.” This office would also have taken over congressional

review of agency rulemaking and prepared an annual report on an estimate of the total costs and benefits of all existing

federal regulations.

For example, they argued for the interpretation that even for statutes that forbid considerations of cost, that risk

tradeoff assessments should be required under these laws, “because risk tradeoffs are part of the effectiveness of the

rule in attaining its risk-reduction goals, rather than a financial cost of the rule.” They also suggested that those who are

disadvantaged when an agency fails to consider tradeoffs in promulgating a rule be given standing to challenge such

agency action.

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12866). They noted that a more radical reform would be to reorganize “the executive branch to

integrate the array of health and environmental protection agencies.” Further, they observed that a

centralized oversight unit for risk assessments, perhaps located in the White House or the U.S.

Public Health Service, could enhance coordination. Several years later, Cass Sunstein proposed

that Congress “create a new subcommittee entrusted specifically with the power to assess

aggregate risk levels, to compare risks, and to initiate revision of statutes that increase net risks,”

and to “address the problem of health-health tradeoffs through a new directive in the

Administrative Procedure Act”; and, in the executive branch, that the Office of Information and

Regulatory Affairs [of the Office of Management and Budget], “should see, as one of its central

assignments, the task of overcoming governmental tunnel vision, but ensuring that aggregate risks

are reduced and that agency focus on particular risks does not mean that ancillary risks are

ignored or increased.”32 These proposals have particular salience since Graham was appointed by

President George W. Bush to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Cass

Sunstein was appointed to the same position by President Barack Obama.

Graham and Sunstein have both focused on making more transparent the regulatory

decisionmaking process, on ensuring the soundness of the science underlying decisions, and on

more rigorous cost- and risk-benefit analyses. These are essential parts of making not only better

decisions, but also could lead to consciously made tradeoffs. So far, however, there is no example

of an explicit, practical tradeoff across programs on the basis of the cost-effectiveness of lives

saved. Even with the overarching authority of the White House behind the Director of the Office

of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Director’s efforts are constrained by institutional

boundaries and statutory dictates.

Despite executive orders and legislated requirements for cost-benefit studies, advances in

evaluating potential tradeoffs have not resolved the issue of how requiring risk assessment and

cost-benefit analysis can be applied coherently across the many environmental, health, and safety

programs, given the differences among the statutes. The decision to diminish resources and effort

in one area is usually separate from a decision and authority to apply those or related resources

and effort in another area. Reconstituting congressional and/or administrative structures to

integrate risk reduction—so that programs now handled more or less independently would go

onto the same table for possible tradeoffs—would imply legislators reallocating their authorities

and responsibilities. 33 This is a rare undertaking of uncertain outcome. 34

Cass Sunstein, Risk and Reason (2002), pp. 117, 150-151.

This was highlighted in the difficulties experienced by the House and Senate as they realigned responsibilities in

order to address the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Congress recognizes these difficulties, and at times has tried to overcome them. For example, noting the difficulties

that Congress experienced in changing governmental structures, which shifted Member and committee responsibilities,

Congress granted the President limited authority to reorganize the government (98 Stat. 3192). When exercised, this

power, which existed during much of the middle of the 20th Century, often created conflict between the President and

Congress, and ultimately the authority was allowed to lapse. See Louis Fischer and (name redacted), “Presidential

Reorganization Authority: Is It Worth the Cost?” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 96, Summer 1981, pp. 301-318.

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Federal Decision Criteria, State and Local Choices,

and Private Sector Preferences: When Tradeoffs

Change Decisionmakers Controlling Resources

In choosing among alternative tax-supported federal programs (e.g., grants, Superfund cleanups),

federal decisionmakers decide where to direct resources from monies they control. In choosing

among alternative federal environmental, health, and safety regulatory programs, federal

decisionmakers mandate expenditures by state and local governments, the private sector, and/or

individuals. It can be tempting to pose tradeoffs across these two situations—between federally

funded programs and federal regulatory programs. Thus, among the examples cited in the preface,

immunization, infant mortality, and care for poor pregnant women are rhetorically proposed as

tradeoffs against clean air; mammograms against stricter air regulations; smoking-cessation

education of pregnant women against groundwater cleanup; and housing, or space, or health

against environmental protection. The putative tradeoffs counterpose public programs paid for

primarily by federal (sometimes state) tax dollars with environmental protection programs paid

for primarily by dollars mandated to be spent by individuals, state and local governments, and/or

the private business sector.

The conceptual commingling of federally funded programs and of federal regulatory mandates

ignores a fundamental obstacle to making tradeoffs. This obstacle arises from the distinct

identities and interests between those who establish the mandate and those who control the use of

the money necessary to meet the mandate. In the case of tradeoffs among established federally

funded programs, the decisionmaker for spending monies remains the same for selected

alternatives: the appropriator and, ultimately, Congress. If Congress decides not to spend the

money on option A, it can spend it on option B, subject to institutional constraints previously

described.

In the case of tradeoffs between federally funded programs and regulatory programs (or between

regulatory programs), however, the legislative decisionmaker mandating the program and the

appropriator ultimately responsible for expenditures to meet regulations are separated. And the

administrator responsible for drafting regulations may find his or her options constrained not only

by the statutes and by funding, but also by explicit congressional directions, which can include

statutory authorizing language specifying deadlines and the inclusion or exclusion of certain

options; appropriations language that earmarks or withholds monies for certain options; and

report language that gives guidance that, even if not binding, may have considerable sway.

Finally, the party which must meet a health, safety, or environmental regulation has to consider

the consequences for the business and owners or stockholders. Each decisionmaker thus faces a

set of incentives and options constrained by the institutional context.

As a result, the alternative of spending tax monies on a federal program versus establishing a

regulatory program not only trades off program benefits, but also changes the payer who decides

on the alternative use of the dollars. From the different settings, each decisionmaker can be

expected to employ different criteria in judging the return on the use of the monies. A federal

program decisionmaker presumably makes tradeoffs on the basis primarily of national values and

needs; a state or local program decisionmaker presumably makes tradeoffs on the basis primarily

of state or local values and needs; a private sector business decisionmaker presumably bases

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tradeoffs primarily on profit and loss considerations; and an individual presumably bases

tradeoffs on personal needs and preferences. These differences are shown in Table 2.

To propose tradeoffs between an environmental regulation and a potential alternative federal

program disregards the different circumstances of the decisionmakers involved. For the

regulatory mandate, the federal decisionmaker knows what purpose the dollars will be spent on; if

the federal decisionmaker decides not to impose that mandate, those dollars remain available to

the state/local, private sector, or individual decisionmaker to spend. If the regulatory mandate is

not imposed or is rescinded as not cost-effective, there is little reason to assume that the

state/local, private sector, or individual decisionmaker controlling those dollars will view an

alternative public service program as a preferred destination for the monies freed up. As a

practical matter, the alternative to a specific federal regulatory mandate is some unknown

option(s) on which other decisionmakers responding to other values or pursuing other goals will

spend those unmandated dollars.

Table 2. Decisionmakers and Decisionmaking Criteria Determining

Regulatory Expenditures to Abate Pollution

Decision-maker

mandating

regulatory cost

Criteria for

requirement to

spend money

Decision-maker

for alternative

expenditure

Consumer

Congress, EPA,

state/local

governments

public interest,

national/state

welfare

consumer

personal preference

State/local mandates

Congress, EPA,

state/local

public interest,

national welfare,

state/local welfare

state/local

policymaker

public interest,

state/local welfare

Private industry

regulations

Congress, EPA,

state/local

public interest,

national/state /local

welfare

corporate

management

corporate interest

Regulated Party

Criteria for

alternative

expenditure

It is certainly possible—some would say highly likely, even indisputable—that some portion of

dollars spent to meet federal requirements could be better spent otherwise by state and local

governments, private businesses, or individuals. Underlying this tradeoff is the debate over the

share of incomes that most effectively and efficiently advances national interests by being spent

by government (federal or state or local) rather than privately (individually or corporately).

Compare the following viewpoints (referring to taxes, but the principles expressed apply

analogously to regulation, often called a “hidden tax”):

... Given a choice between keeping taxes high so the government has more money to spend

and ... reducing the tax burden so families can put more money aside to invest in their own

child-care needs, retirement needs, health-care needs or whatever needs they choose, my

preference is the latter....

Letting people keep their money is the best way to address the social problems that confront

us, now and in the future.35

*****

Bill Archer, “Paying Down the Debt,” The Washington Post (2 Feb. 1998), p. A18.

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Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) publicly tells me I “ought to pay less taxes, ought to keep

more” of my money because I “can make better decisions than we [our elected leaders in

Washington] can.”

Thank you, Sen. Domenici, but I emphatically and sincerely disagree. My federal

government does well hundreds of things I want done and which I would not have any idea

of how to do by keeping every cent to myself. Because of the taxes we pay, the Great Lakes,

the Chesapeake Bay, the Charles River, the Chicago River and the Potomac River are all

cleaner, healthier and more alive than they were just a generation ago.36

What seems clear is that even if state and local, corporate, or private investments in alternatives to

pollution control mandates would contribute equally—or even more—to net national welfare,

there is little reason to assume the alternatives would be selected from more cost-effective

environmental, health, or safety programs such as immunization, education, or care for poor

pregnant women.

As Thomas O. McGarity, a student of the legal implications of regulations, has noted:

Even under the highly contestable assumption that a cost-benefit criterion would eliminate

waste, no vehicle exists for channeling the savings to the most deserving social programs.

The savings will invariably go to the regulatees, who may or may not spend them on

activities that benefit society. Absent some governmental vehicle for directing how regulated

entities spend the resources saved by less stringent regulation, they will devote resources to

things that make their shareholders happy. 37

The other side of the argument that money necessary to meet regulations could be spent more

effectively on alternatives38 is that the beneficiaries of a regulation also have more money to

spend. For example, if because of an air pollution regulation people avoid adverse health effects,

any monies that would have been spent on consequent visits to doctors or hospitals are saved and

available for alternative uses. But again, even if these beneficiaries can be identified, how they

will use the savings is unknown.

In short, there are tradeoffs for each dollar paid out to abate and control pollution. But it is not $1

for pollution control versus $1 for some comparable or superior public good. Rather, it is $1 for

pollution control on the one hand, versus $1 for an unknown purpose on the other—with the

probability that the criterion for deciding on how otherwise to spend the money will not be

national welfare. (Which is not to say that the alternative expenditure would necessarily fail to

equally or better serve national wellbeing: one just cannot know.) As a practical matter, it is not

usually possible to specify tradeoffs for dollars expended on regulatory programs. Tradeoffs exist,

but except through imposing alternative mandates, the policymaker seeking to protect the

environment, health, or safety, is not in a position to direct those funds to particular options.39

Mark Shields, “Taxes Well Spent,” The Washington Post (4 August 1997), p. A19.

Thomas O. McGarity, “A Cost-Benefit State,” Administrative Law Review, Vol. 50, no. 1 (1998), pp. 34-35.

The disposition of the monies may have another implication for risk. Income levels correlate negatively with

mortality, presumably because lower income means people have less to spend on health. If regulations lead to slower

economic growth, the lower income levels imply there will be statistical loss of life. Isolating this tradeoff has proven

highly problematic. The idea of incorporating an income-mortality tradeoff in actual policymaking has been broached

but so far remains largely academic. See W. Kip Viscousi, “The Dangers of Unbounded Commitments To Regulate

Risk,” in Robert W. Hahn, ed., Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation (Washington,

D.C.: The AEI Press, 1996), pp. 159-162.

I.e., Congress enacting in lieu a comparable mandate, or an administrator imposing in lieu a comparable regulation.

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Consequently, the policymaker is motivated to achieve whatever is possible through the program

at hand: “... [R]egulators are not empowered to maximize collective welfare by allocating public

funds among all manner of social problems. They face discrete issues that demand concrete

responses. Even legislators, with their broad lawmaking authority, must work within the

constraints of the political process.”40

Weighing Tradeoffs: Where Does It Lead?

In the end, comparative assessments of costs (and benefits and risks) of alternative programs

benefitting the public welfare, or of alternative regulatory mandates, provide information to

policymakers and the public.41 The information can promote better understanding of risks, costs,

and benefits. It may allow policymakers, within their constraints, to focus resources on the most

cost-effective environmental, health, and safety interventions. But comparative risk information

does not mean that a tradeoff can be or will be accomplished. A study of state and local

comparative risk projects to establish environmental priorities concluded that

Successes to date include increasing environmental awareness among participants; building

consensus and establishing collaboration among diverse stakeholders; and establishing novel

means of public involvement. However, no project that we evaluated has, as yet,

documented achievement of a system for developing and implementing environmental

priorities in order to mitigate their most significant environmental problems [italics added].42

For the decisionmaker, a dollar is being spent on “this” rather than on “something else.” While

the “this” is in the decisionmaker’s purview, the “something else” may well be either outside his

or her purview, or it may be completely open-ended, in the realm of the marketplace. The debate

over enactment of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 was not over whether the $21 billion

tab43 should be spent on clean air or on immunization, infant mortality, care for poor pregnant

women, or something else; it was over whether to require $21 billion to be spent on clean air or

more or less (or not at all).44 Similarly, the mid-1990s debate over proposed National Ambient Air

Quality Standards for ozone and particulate matter was not over whether the multibillion dollar

tab should be spent on cleaner air or on mammograms or some particular thing else, it was over

Douglas A. Kysar, “Some Realism About Environmental Skepticism: The Implications of Bjorn Lomborg’s The

Skeptical Environmentalist for Environmental Law and Policy,” Ecology Law Quarterly, Vol. 30, no. 223 (2003), p.

258.

Tengs and Graham, op. cit., pp. 191, 193; Sunstein, op. cit., p. 107.

David Lewis Feldman, et al., “Environmental Priority-Setting Through Comparative Risk Assessment,”

Environmental Management, vol. 23, no. 4 (1999), 483.

These are not federally appropriated dollars provided by taxpayers; these are (estimated) costs of regulations and

arise from foregone profits from alternative investments, lost wages or rents, and/or consumer expenditures to cover

higher prices of goods.

During the 1990 debate on the Clean Air Act Amendments, a working agreement emerged that the bill could impose

some $25 billion in costs per year after 2000. Some legislators argued that this was too much and others that this was

not enough; but as a practical matter, the majority accepted this as a reasonable pricetag for the program. Given the

difficulties in assessing costs and benefits, it is not surprising that estimates of costs of the legislation ranged greatly,

from the low 20s to 90 billion dollars per year. E.H. Pechan & Associates, Clean Air Act Amendment Costs and

Economic Effects: A Review of Published Studies (Prepared for National Clean Air Coalition, National Clean Air Fund,

Washington, D.C.), in Congressional Record (October 27, 1990), S16963-S16969 [daily ed.] The test of the bill’s

adherence to $25 billion in costs was EPA’s “official” estimate.

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whether to set standards that would result in those regulated to spend more (or less) money on

cleaner air.

For a legislator who faces a vote on imposing costs—for example, the Clean Air Act Amendments

of 1990—or a policymaker who faces a decision on a regulation—for example, the ozone and

particulate matter standards—the choice is basically up-or-down and more-or-less, not on

tradeoffs with other programs. To turn down the amendment or defer the regulation does not

mean more cost-effective environmental, health, or safety alternatives will take its place: it is a

question of following through or starting the policy process anew (see text box, “A Policymaker’s

Options”). With choices tending be up-or-down and limited only to alternatives germane within

relevant jurisdictional boundaries, proponents of environmental, health, and safety initiatives are

loathe to forego or reduce any program, even if its cost-effectiveness is questionable, because

they so seldom can ensure reinvestment of any saved resources in more cost-effective

alternatives.

Only in the abstract, then, is any and every

alternative an opportunity cost of each federal

dollar spent and of every federal regulation

imposing costs. In reality, the actual tradeoff

faced by a policymaker at a particular time and

place—subcommittee, committee, or the floor

of Congress; or Commission or Agency—is

effectively limited by institutional structures

and rules and by the incommensurable criteria

brought by different decisionmakers who

would ultimately decide on the actual

alternatives for spending any dollars the

tradeoffs make available.

The question, How much of “this” could you

buy if one didn’t impose regulation “x,” can

therefore be answered in two divergent ways:

A Policymaker’s Options

Someone has compared a decisionmaker facing a vote or

policy choice to a person on the eve of being married

and who is asked: “Out of the millions of prospective

spouses, can you be confident that the one you are

taking to the altar could not be replaced by someone

more attractive, or more companion-able, or more

intelligent, or sexier, or richer, or offering better genes

to mix with yours?”

This analogy contains two important parallels to

policymakers weighing tradeoffs. First, in both cases, the

decisionmaker has presumably weighed the merits of the

choice across a spectrum of qualities (of which cost is

just one). And second, in both cases, the decisionmaker

has really only the option of going ahead or starting

over: the choice is not this spouse or, say, Emmanuelle

Chriqui/James Franco, it is a question of following

through on the engagement, or starting the courtship C

or policy process C anew.

One way is to take an estimated cost of regulation “x” and divide by the unit cost of “this,”

resulting in the equivalent number of mammograms, inoculations, or whatever. That number is

information that may help to give perspective on the magnitude of the cost of regulation “x”—but

at the same time it may give a sense that a tradeoff is feasible when it is not.

The second way of answering the question is to put the compared costs into context, examining

whether the monies involved in “x” and “this” are really fungible. Whether those expenditures are

truly alternatives depends on the options posed, the decisionmakers involved, and the institutional

setting. There may be definite options, as when an appropriations subcommittee allocates dollars

among programs in its jurisdiction; but in other cases the tradeoff may be between an intended

outcome and the nebulous consequence of not opting for that outcome. Putting the label

“statistical murder” on the failure to make tradeoffs is rhetorically powerful, connoting a wilful

choice to choose a less protective or more costly option. But in reality, legislators and

administrators rarely if ever are in a position to select among the implied options as they

authorize, fund, and implement health, safety, and regulatory programs.

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The problem is depicted in Figure 1: Putative tradeoffs among environmental, health, and safety

expenditures presume that all programs are on the table, as shown in Figure 1-A, each with a

specified dollar amount per unit that gives one measure of potential cost-effectiveness; but the

voting legislator typically has only a single program on the table at a time, the result of a

deliberate, formal process of agenda setting, as shown in Figure 1-B; and the administrator(s) of

diverse programs generally finds each program on a separate table, with the boundaries of each

defined by a separate statute that gives little or no authority to an administrator to compare and

reallocate resources across them, as illustrated in Figure 1-C.

In the end, the underlying issue of environmental, health, and safety cost-effectiveness is how to

foster decision processes and structures that enable tradeoffs that reflect the informed preferences

of the citizenry. Evidence indicates that programs vary in cost-effectiveness. However, given that

there is more to comparing programs than just costs, one could argue that the current

environmental, health, and safety program mix—the result of the present decisionmaking

structure—may in fact reflect citizen preferences (though not necessarily expert opinion).

Where tradeoffs would appear to result in more consistent, cost-effective protection of health,

safety, or the environment, better information may in the short run contribute to improved

decisions in allocating resources, but legislators’ and administrators’ options are limited. There is

a big gap between identifying a potential tradeoff and being able to make the tradeoff. The stakes

are high for winners and losers, especially for those who gain or lose authority to make decisions

about expenditures. In the long-run, better information about desirable tradeoffs may suggest

realignments of decision structures—leading to a different, complex, and difficult set of

institutional decisions.45

In the meantime, if an existing or a proposed program is identified as insufficiently cost-effective

and therefore appropriate for trading off, there is rarely any way to actually terminate it while

concomitantly creating a more cost-effective one. The most likely result of a “tradeoff” would be

either to kill one program without gaining the more cost-effective alternative; or to create a new

more cost-effective program while also maintaining the program with inferior cost-effectiveness.

For either option, there is a stakeholder with a natural resistance—depending on whether one is

more concerned about costs or benefits.

See Giandomenico Majone, Evidence, Argument & Persuasion in the Policy Process (Yale University Press, 1989),

pp. 95-115; and Victor P. Goldberg, “Institutional Change and the Quasi-Invisible Hand,” 17 J. of Law and Economics

(1974), pp. 461-492.

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Figure 1. Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs

Source: CRS.

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Environmental, Health, and Safety Tradeoffs

Author Contact Information

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Resources, Science and Industry

[redact ed]@crs.loc.gov, 7-....

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(name redacted)

Section Research Manager

[redacted]@crs.loc.g

ov, 7-....

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