Agency flexibility reforms drew critique as untransparent, unenforceable, and unauthorized.

Evidence

While the business community and some within the environmental community applauded many of these reforms at the EPA and Interior, other environmentalists and many academic commentators expressed concern. They worried about the lack of meaningful public participation and absence of transparency in a system of decentralized decisionmaking that would allow for permits to be issued in the absence of complete information. They further objected to the lack of effective monitoring and compliance assurance resulting from a shift away from enforceable obligations and toward “voluntary” steps, and away from federal overseers and toward state and local officials who might be too close to those being regulated. Finally, many questioned the legality of these reforms on the ground that the existing environmental and natural resource statutes did not authorize the EPA and Interior to adopt reforms that in effect waived or “adapted” the statute’s strict terms. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 699

Categorization

• XREF: The transparency-participation critique maps cleanly onto the reader’s Eco-Justice concern for who is heard in environmental governance and onto soundscape regulation’s monitoring limits.