Lisa Heinzerling has written two pieces at the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog concerning regulatory failures at the Department of Justice and the Food & Drug Administration.
This essay discusses a DOJ cost-benefit analysis performed in conjunction with the issuance of a rule implementing The Prison Rape Elimination Act. Here's an excerpt:
DOJ found itself in the remarkable position of asking how much money the victims of rape would be willing to pay to avoid rape and also asking how much money these victims would be willing to accept in exchange for being raped. In the strange logic and twisted morality of cost-benefit analysis, the victim – not the perpetrator – must be willing to pay up to avoid the crime. If not, well, too bad for the victim. Never mind that rape is a serious crime, not a market transaction. Never mind that framing rape as a market transaction strips it of the coercion that defines it. *** Applying cost-benefit analysis to rape takes this already-troubled methodology to a new, and bad, frontier. The Obama Administration should ask itself whether this is the kind of legacy it hopes to deepen in a second term: a legacy that holds that any human encounter, no matter how violent and coerced, can be treated as just another day at the market.
Read the entire piece for more on this outrage.
Heinzerling's other piece tells the story of inexcusable delay in the FDA's consideration of a rule to limit the use of antibiotics in animal feed. (The failure to impose reasonable limits can lead to antibiotic resistance in humans.)
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