This Court Case Could Normalize Vibes-Based Regulation
If you think federal regulators care about data-driven, evidence-based policymaking, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will leave you scratching your head.
The case involves a terrible Biden administration regulation driven by Big Labor. In defending this regulation, which mandates that crews on freight trains include at least two people, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Transportation leaned heavily not on data or evidence but on “common sense.”
This, of course, is about a lot more than trains. It’s a microcosm of a much larger issue.
Emotion-based regulation is a destructive way to regulate the complex and dynamic U.S. economy—unless you happen to favor the lesser freedom and dynamism found on the European continent. In the case of this U.S. rule, the government admits that it has no actual evidence that two-person crews are safer than one-person crews. Instead, the agency has asked the court to defer to what it calls a “common-sense product of reasoned decision-making.”
This language might sound like harmless bureaucratic boilerplate. It’s anything but.
It represents a dangerous precedent—one by which agencies can sidestep their legal responsibility to document actual market failures that necessitate regulation, to present cost-benefit analyses, or even just to show substantive safety concerns.
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Article from Reason.com
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