560 new rules an Obama legacy

First reluctant to use executive power, gridlock forced hand

WASHINGTON -- In nearly eight years in office, President Barack Obama has sought to reshape the nation with a sweeping assertion of executive authority and a canon of regulations that has inserted the U.S. government more deeply into American life.

Once a presidential candidate with misgivings about executive power, Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history.

The Obama administration in its first seven years finalized 560 major regulations -- those classified by the Congressional Budget Office as having particularly significant economic or social impacts. That was nearly 50 percent more than the George W. Bush administration during the comparable period, according to data kept by the regulatory studies center at George Washington University.

The administration's regulatory legacy has become an issue in the campaign to replace Obama, as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has criticized regulatory overreach and promised to undo many of the new rules. But executive power has expanded steadily under both Republican and Democratic presidents in recent decades, and both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have promised to act in the service of their own goals.

The new rules built on the legislative victories Obama won during his first two years in office. Those laws -- the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Act and the $800 billion economic stimulus package -- transformed the nation's health care system, curbed the ambitions of the big banks and injected financial support into a creaky economy. But as Republicans increased their control of Capitol Hill, Obama's frustration with congressional opposition led to a new approach: He gradually embraced a president's power to act unilaterally.

For example, Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first chief of staff, in May 2009 raised concerns about Janice Langbehn, a social worker featured in The New York Times who was barred from visiting her hospitalized same-sex partner.

Passing legislation to address the problem was unlikely, Emanuel knew, given entrenched ideological opposition and the White House's focus on overhauling the health insurance system. But Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the newly created Office of Health Reform, suggested an alternative: The administration had the power to impose conditions on hospitals that got federal Medicare funding.

A year later, the president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to develop regulations requiring hospitals to extend visitation rights to same-sex partners. A focus on similar issues produced more than 100 executive actions and regulatory changes intended to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, particularly after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

A White House push to pass a sweeping climate-change bill in 2009 failed in Congress, but almost from the outset, some of Obama's aides were working on a Plan B. Cass Sunstein, Obama's choice to lead the White House office that oversees rule-making, and Michael Greenstone, the first head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, created an internal task force to put a dollar figure on the cost of carbon emissions.

The government does not try to quantify all the benefits of proposed regulations. When it came to environmental regulations, analysts often assigned a dollar figure to just one kind of damage -- emissions of "small particles" -- and then stacked up the costs of the proposal against the benefits of fewer particles.

Quantifying a second kind of damage, from carbon emissions, would broaden the assessed benefits of new regulations -- potentially justifying new and stronger restrictions. In 2010, the administration issued a report that estimated the economic impact of global warming, including agricultural disruptions, increased flooding and health problems. It pegged the cost of carbon emissions at $21 per ton. An updated assessment in 2013 raised the price tag to $33.

When the administration announced stricter standards for automobile fuel efficiency in 2011, it cited the reduction in carbon emissions as a key benefit. Those benefits have since been cited in several dozen new regulations, including the hotly debated 2015 rule seeking to restrict emissions from new power plants.

The pace of regulation stalled somewhat in 2012, as political concerns were raised about announcing sweeping new regulations during the campaign. In 2013, Obama's team briefly hoped his victory would lead to legislative progress, but Republicans blocked gun-control measures and an immigration overhaul, and partisan gridlock shut down the government for 15 days that October.

In January 2014, the president stood before Congress and declared "a year of action" -- with or without the help of the Republicans arrayed before him.

"Whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do," Obama said in his State of the Union address.

Obama announced an executive order raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for several hundred thousand cooks, janitors and other federal contract workers. In subsequent orders, each resulting in a new regulation, the president required contractors to let their workers take paid sick days and banned discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers. He also increased workplace protections for all workers at businesses that held federal contracts -- an umbrella covering roughly 29 million workers.

"What the president was ultimately doing was holding up the United States government as a model employer," said Joseph Geevarghese, director of Good Jobs Nation, a union-backed advocacy group that pressed the administration to embrace its regulatory power. "And it created a ripple effect. Within months of the president acting, you had private CEOs -- Ikea, Gap, Disney, airlines -- saying they, too, were going to boost minimum pay."

With the president's blessing, the EPA also became more aggressive. The agency asserted federal authority to protect thousands of waterways and wetlands, proposed to cap carbon emissions at new and existing power plants, raised emissions standards for trucks and airplanes, and called for new limits on methane, mercury and ozone.

"He has been much more ambitious and aggressive on environmental regulation than any other president we've had," said Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer pursuing legal challenges to some of Obama's signature environmental rules.

A Section on 08/14/2016

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