Moving Forward on Public Health and Safety with Just the Stroke of the Pen? Yes, Obama Can

After the last of the applause lines has been delivered, and while the crowd that gathered for his historic second inauguration is still filing out of town, President Obama will once again sit at his desk in the Oval Office and begin the tough policy work that will define his second term in office and shape the legacy he will leave behind. Among the many challenges he'll face over the next four years will be an urgent agenda of addressing critical threats to public health, safety, and the environment that the Administration let languish during the first term. But good luck to him if he decides to attack the problems with legislation. The election made the numbers in both chambers of Congress somewhat more favorable to the President's cause. But it'd take an earth-shattering event or at least another election to get protective legislation out of the House of Representatives, which vacillates between being sullen and defiant and will undoubtedly return to its anti-regulatory drum-beating as soon as the fiscal "crisis" is over. So what's a President to do? Use every bit of executive power he can marshal, in this case, by directing the regulatory agencies to move with dispatch to regulate and enforce in a number of vital areas. In Protecting People and the Environment by the Stroke of a Presidential Pen: Seven New Executive Orders for President Obama's Second Term, released today, my colleagues and I at the Center for Progressive Reform explain how the President can take the first vital step by making full use of his authority to manage executive agencies - including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - by issuing a series of Executive Orders. The Orders recommended in the CPR Issue Alert would address several pressing health, safety, and environmental challenges: Climate change mitigation and adaptation; Dangerous food, drug, and consumer product imports; Threats to the health and safety of children and future generations; and Hazardous working conditions for "contingent workers" (i.e., a growing portion of the U.S. labor force that encompasses workers who are not employed on any kind of long-term contractual basis).