Regulatory Ingenuity
The United States’ legacy regulatory architecture has struggled to keep pace with an ever-more dynamic and complex society – and the “wicked problems” confronting it. Trying to solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s strategies results in government by kludge, eroding faith in our democratic institutions and inhibiting us from making progress that feels real and fair to all Americans.
Mismatches between the tools we need and the tools we have are particularly apparent in the environmental space. Foundational environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were originally designed to curb industrial pollution, not guide the society-wide economic transition that climate change, the predominant environmental challenge of our time, demands. Our approaches to tackling other environmental challenges, like drought or wildfires, would benefit from updates as well.
There is a need for creativity and cleverness – i.e., ingenuity – in how we approach environmental and other types of regulation. FAS is bringing together people across disciplines and ideologies to advance a paradigm of regulatory ingenuity in two ways:
- Ingenuity in regulatory design. Looking across the entire regulatory lifecycle – from underlying statutory construction, to rule development, to implementation and (ideally) iterative improvement – to seriously examine how existing regulatory systems in the United States can be improved, and identify where fresh thinking is needed.
- Ingenuity in regulatory application. Wicked problems can’t be solved through regulations alone. Indeed, substantial progress can be made even without direct federal regulatory drivers, and even excellent regulatory designs can fail without complementary policies. CRI will consider how regulations can be coupled with other tools (e.g., innovative market designs, financial instruments, contracting mechanisms, etc.) to achieve societal goals quickly, equitably, and durably.
Our goal is to socialize and test solutions that emerge where real-world opportunities emerge in the near and medium term – including at the state and local levels – while also working, over time, to implement, test, and refine these ideas for the long haul.
The Trump Administration has moved with alarming speed to demolish programs, regulations, and institutions that were intended to make our communities and planet more liveable.
To fight the climate crises, we must do more than connect power plants to the grid: we need new policy frameworks and expanded coalitions to facilitate the rapid transformation of the electricity system.
As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge.