Default standards flipped industry incentives to favor prompt EPA rulemaking

Evidence

Congress did not, however, merely impose deadlines for the promulgation of those standards —it further divided the universe of hazardous wastes into discrete categories, established different deadlines for each category, and created very demanding default standards that would apply in the absence of deadline compliance. The practical effect of this legislation was that the regulated community now had even more incentive than the EPA or the environmental community to ensure that the statutory deadlines were met. Largely eliminated were industry efforts to slow down the rulemaking process, and virtually all of the deadlines were, in fact, ultimately met. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 849

Categorization

• XREF: A clean example of legal ‘incentive design’ that grounds the Legal Systems institutional analysis. — connects to: 1970s Congress wrote ever-tighter statutory deadlines to curb presidential and EPA discretion. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 373; Industry capture follows from regulators’ incentives and diffuse public interest — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 584; Governance by incentives and benchmarks replaces top-down law and rule — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 56 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverted burden of delay — making the party who benefits from inaction prefer action — is a genuine legal-architecture insight worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• External institutional incentives can align interests with commitments #expands (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 167
• Industry capture follows from regulators’ incentives and diffuse public interest #corroborates (0.82) — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law, 584
• Governance by incentives and benchmarks replaces top-down law and rule #expands (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 56
• Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms #complicates (0.75)