Liberation Day for Gas-Powered Cars

The Senate votes to end California’s EV quota. Will Newsom give it up?

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Under California’s EV regime, 35% of auto maker sales next year are required to be “zero-emission vehicles,” rising to 68% in 2030 and 100% by 2035. The Clean Air Act lets California set its own vehicle emissions standards, which was meant to address its historically smoggier air. CO2 emissions from gas cars don’t contribute to pollution, but the Environmental Protection Agency under President Biden granted a waiver to bless the policy.

A dozen or so other states have also adopted California’s rules. But auto makers aren’t anywhere close to meeting the quotas. In 2023 EVs made up a mere 13% of sales for traditional car makers in California, 8% in Massachusetts and 6% in New York.

Auto makers warn the quotas would force them to produce fewer gas cars. Prices would almost certainly rise to offset their EV losses. The mandate would harm workers, too. Auto makers have shed jobs as they ratchet up EV production. Michigan has lost 11,600 motor vehicle and parts jobs in the past two years."

Health Risks From Dry Cleaning Remain Low

See Does a Ban on Dry-Cleaning Chemicals Mean You Should Change Your Routine? by Sumathi Reddy of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"For the average person picking up their dry cleaning and wearing a dry-cleaned suit, the health risks from Perc are small, says Diana M. Ceballos, an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle’s department of environmental and occupational health sciences. 

Residue can stick on clothing, vaporize into the air and be inhaled. But those exposures for most consumers “are not super high and they’re sporadic,” she says."

"Nigel Brockton, vice president of research at the American Institute for Cancer Research, says the general population’s exposure to these chemicals is likely very limited.

​“It’s a good thing that [the EPA] are eliminating these carcinogens but unless you’ve had substantial exposure, either through occupation or through industrial contamination of your environment, we would still say focus on the factors that you can control,” says Brockton, who recommends activities like eating a healthy diet and limiting alcohol."

San Francisco vs. the Biden EPA

The city of good liberals asks the Supreme Court for regulatory relief

WSJ editorial. 

"Well, well. Look who’s asking the Supreme Court for help against overreaching regulators. On Wednesday the Justices will consider whether the Environmental Protection Agency can punish the city of San Francisco for dirty water in the Pacific Ocean.

City and County of San Francisco v. EPAinvolves a permitting scheme under the 1972 Clean Water Act. The law requires localities and businesses to obtain permits to discharge pollutants into waterways.

San Francisco operates a sewage and stormwater treatment system that experiences overflows during heavy storms, resulting in effluent discharges into the Pacific. The EPA in 2019 imposed conditions on its permits that hold the city’s system responsible if its discharges “cause or contribute” to water in the Pacific that violates federal and state standards.

EPA and the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper then sued San Francisco for sewage discharges since 2013 that they say contributed to dirty water in the Pacific. Each permit violation is punishable with fines of more than $66,000 a day. San Francisco’s potential liability runs into the hundreds of millions.

San Francisco says it’s unfair to hold it responsible for the ocean pollution since there are hundreds of other culprits. The city adds that the Clean Water Act lets EPA specify limits only on discharges or technology to control pollution from so-called point sources.

EPA’s generic permit conditions makes compliance with the law “elusive, because a waterbody’s ability to meet water quality standards at any time depends on pollutants that all sources—not just San Francisco—contribute,” San Francisco says in its brief. “The City consequently lacks advanced notice of how much it must control its discharges.”

While seeking enormous penalties, EPA is leaving the city “in the dark about what it allegedly did wrong,” San Francisco says. In short, EPA has set a moving target that the city has no way of meeting, short of shutting down its sewage system.

EPA cites language in the Clean Water Act that lets it impose permit conditions that set “effluent limitations” and “any more stringent limitation, including those necessary to meet water quality standards.” But San Francisco says such unbridled regulatory authority conflicts “with the text, structure, and historical context” of the Clean Water Act.

That law’s predecessor, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, notably applied the same permitting approach as the EPA is trying to apply now. This resulted in endless litigation that failed to improve water quality. Congress repealed the law and replaced it with the Clean Water Act’s permitting scheme that directs the EPA to set specific limits on discharges.

Citing the Court’s landmark Loper Bright Enterprises decision last term, San Francisco parses the text of the Clean Water Act to rebut the EPA. Sundry industry groups warn in friend-of-the-court briefs supporting San Francisco that letting the EPA’s expansive interpretation prevail would create enormous uncertainty that harms business.

You have to smile at San Francisco’s good liberals howling about regulators and invoking the Loper Bright opinion that most of them derided. Maybe they’ll tell the Senate Democrats who want to end independent judicial review."

Supreme Court Clarifies Murky “Waters of the United States” Definition: It No Longer Includes Mud Puddles

By Jay Schweikert and Isaiah McKinney of Cato.

"This week, in Sackett v. EPA, the Supreme Court closed the book on Mike and Chantell Sackett’s 19 year saga of trying to build on their land. In 2004, the Sacketts purchased property 500 feet from the shores of Priest Lake, Idaho. In 2007, after they started to fill in wet spots in their property so they could build a home, EPA officials informed the Sacketts that their property was a wetland adjacent to a tributary that fed into the lake, and therefore counted as “navigable waters” under the EPA’s jurisdiction pursuant to the Clean Water Act (“CWA”). The Sacketts would need to get a permit if they wanted to build, and a permit, if the Sacketts could get one, would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Sacketts challenged the EPA’s decision, but the lower court decided the EPA’s order was not “final,” so the Sacketts could not challenge it. The Sacketts appealed, eventually going to the Supreme Court in 2012, which held that the EPA’s decision was a final order and the Sacketts were able to challenge it.

11 years later, the Sacketts were back at the Supreme Court, this time asking whether their property could be regulated as “waters of the United States” under the CWA. This is the fourth time the Supreme Court has addressed the scope of this provision—and this time the Court got it right.

The story of CWA regulation and litigation is too long and confusing to tell here in full. But the last time the Supreme Court addressed the scope of “navigable waters”—which the statute further defines as “waters of the United States”—in 2006, the Court split 4–1‑4, so there was no controlling majority. The two main opinions from that case, Rapanos v. United States—written by Justices Scalia and Kennedy respectively—disagreed on the test that should be applied to determine if a wetland was “waters of the United States.” Justice Scalia’s test would apply to “permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water,” and wetlands that shared a “continuous surface connection” to such permanent bodies of water. Justice Kennedy considered this term more broadly to include all bodies of water that had a “significant nexus” with navigable‐​in‐​fact waters.

Lower courts split on which test to apply, but most courts applied Justice Kennedy’s broader test. One of the issues with his test, however, was that “significant nexus” had no real limiting principle. Land that was in no way connected to navigable waters, but which was damp for a couple months of the year, could be regulated as “waters of the United States” because sufficient water molecules from that land interacted with nearby bodies of water. Justice Kennedy’s test was indeed expansive.

This week, the Court unanimously rejected the significant nexus test and held that the EPA lacked jurisdiction to prohibit the Sacketts from building on their land. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, essentially adopted Justice Scalia’s test from Rapanos. Quoting from Justice Scalia’s opinion, Justice Alito explained that the term “waters of the United States” is limited to “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographical features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.” But amendments to the CWA, in a provision discussing permits, state that the EPA can regulate not only “waters of the United States,” but also “adjacent wetlands.” These “adjacent wetlands” must not be distinct and separate from “waters of the United States,” Alito explained, because otherwise the amendments would be drastically changing the scope of the statute via an ancillary provision. Congress was not changing the scope of the CWA by allowing permits for wetlands. Rather an “adjacent wetland” is an “indistinguishably part of a body of water that itself constitutes ‘waters’ under the CWA.” Therefore, as Scalia wrote in 2006, “adjacent wetlands” must be connected to navigable waters via “a continuous surface connection.”

This decision brings clarity to an area of the law that has been infamously obtuse. The scope of the CWA has bounced back and forth for decades, leaving farmers, homebuilders, and property owners across this country in confusion on what they can and cannot do on their property. Not only did the Supreme Court pen a happy ending for the Sacketts—they will now get to build their dream home—but property owners everywhere have received much needed clarity on whether their property qualifies as “waters of the United States.” Not only did property rights win the day, but so also did clarity and simplicity."

EPA exaggerates danger of Ethylene oxide

See Forget AI: The Administrative State Is a Bad by Holman Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Ethylene oxide is a naturally occurring chemical produced by plant growth and decay, industrial and natural combustion, and the human body. Its industrial uses include sterilization of half of U.S. medical supplies, 200 billion items a year. Landing on suburban Chicago’s Sterigenics and other plants out of the blue were hundreds of lawsuits because the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, based on no new information, decided ethylene oxide was 60 times more dangerous than previously thought.

The EPA’s own Science Advisory Board criticized the finding (and was bypassed by EPA rule makers). Texas regulators conducted a review and found the result to be implausible. Evidence that ethylene oxide is even carcinogenic is based on government studies of occupational exposure between 1938 and 1986 that found a lower-than-normal cancer incidence except for a few rare cancers of questionable statistical significance. Casting more doubt is a recent published study underlining just how wildly uncertain were EPA’s estimates of worker exposure during the decades in question.

Understand: 93% of ethylene oxide exposure comes from natural processes; less than 1% of industrial exposure is caused by the sterilization industry, or less than 0.07% of total exposure. The new EPA IRIS “safe” limit is 1,500 times lower than the concentration in suburban air; it’s 1/40th the level created inside the human body by normal metabolic processes.

None of which matters to EPA’s implicit allies in the trial bar, who are eager to lay blame for every cancer within miles of a sterilization plant. A chemophobe cult inside the EPA, chemical by chemical, is deciding industries must be undetectable to their instruments or disappear from the earth. If you inhale 150 parts per trillion of ethylene oxide and half of one part per trillion is from the medical-implement sterilization industry, that industry should cease to exist. But try finding any of this in the ample press coverage that treats the EPA’s risk calculation as simply beyond question."

Electric Cars: Policy Beyond Capability?

By Peter Van Doren of Cato.

"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced proposed emission standards that would mandate a large increase in the sale of new zero‐​emission vehicles from model years 2027 through 2032. Compliance with the proposed rule is estimated to require 67 percent of new vehicles to be electric in 2032 compared to 5.8 percent in 2022. Informed analysts claim that the rule is extremely ambitious: “The new rule will effectively try to shove electric vehicles down the throats of the public at a faster rate than it has shown a willingness to swallow them.” The Energy Information Administration in its 2023 Annual Energy Outlook (Figure 10) would seem to confirm the ambitious nature of the proposed rule, projecting electric vehicles sales of around 15 percent in the early 2030s and still under 20 percent by 2050.

But the unrealistic nature of the proposal is actually a persistent characteristic of environmental policy. So persistent, in fact, that Charles Jones used the phrase “policy beyond capability” in a 1975 book (chapters 7–8). Alan Altshuler in a 1979 book (p. 73) elaborated: “There was a widespread view in 1970 that the manufacturers could do virtually anything if simply told they had to.”

The history of environmental regulation consists of ambitious unrealistic goals followed by missed deadlines and lack of enforcement. The most ambitious unrealistic goal was the California legislative proposal in 1970 to ban the internal combustion engine by 1975. The California State Senate approved the bill while floor consideration in the Assembly failed by one vote. The 1970 national Clean Air Act required ambient air quality standards be achieved by 1975. The deadlines were extended many times (pp. 237–238). By 2005, of the 338 deadlines set by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 only 37 had been met by the deadline (Table 2) specified in the statute.

This pattern has been described (pp. 239–240) as “Institutionalized Nonattainment.” As of March 2022, 15 counties with a population of 20,941,659 are in nonattainment of the 2012 annual standard for particulate matter (PM_2.5). For pollutants other than PM_2.5,37 states, districts, and territories have nonattainment counties with a total population of 131,418,000. Finally, as of 2016 over half of U.S. river and stream miles violate water quality standards.

If agencies attempt to implement unrealistic policies Congress often retreats quietly. It enacts legislative language to the monies appropriated for the Departments that restricts their ability to implement unrealistic regulations. To implement the 1970 Clean Air Act requirements the EPA proposed parking surcharges and parking space reductions. Congress responded in 1974 with a ban on use of any EPA funds to regulate parking (Altshuler pp. 78–79).

Under rare circumstances unrealistic policies proceed far enough to alienate voters and receive direct congressional attention. 1974 model year automobiles were required to have electronics that prevented automobiles from being started unless the seatbelts were in use. Motorists revolted and in October 1974 Congress enacted (pp. 180–81) legislation (pp. 21, 42–43) prohibiting the use of that technology or any seat belt warning buzzer that sounded for more than eight seconds.

Environmental policy has these characteristics because it has a large theological component. Saving the planet is different from bargaining over the Library of Congress Budget: “the emissions of greenhouse gases from Interior Department lands (about 20 percent of the United States) were ‘playing God’ with the Earth’s climate.”

So, the Biden EPA proposal is probably unrealistic. But environmental policy proposals have always been unrealistic. The retreat from unrealism will probably be quiet. But if motorists can’t buy the cars they want, the retreat will be visible and rapid."

The EPA Regulatory Reconsideration of Fine Particulates

By Benjamin Zycher of AEI.

"I betray no secret when I report that much regulatory policy has been deeply politicized, and that is a vast understatement when it comes to many EPA actions under the Clean Air Act. Consider the regulation — the promulgation of a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard — of fine particulate matter (“PM2.5”), which, under the terms of the CAA, EPA is required to review every five years in light of “the best available science.”

Get real. A new rule was promulgated in December 2020, satisfying all of the public notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. It maintained the standard adopted in the previous rule from 2012, precisely because there is little evidence that a further tightening would yield any beneficial aggregate health benefits at all. Under the schedule required under the law, a new rule would be required in 2025, by which year “the best available science” might have advanced sufficiently to justify a different NAAQS. But because the Biden administration took office in 2021, adherence to the schedule mandated legally would not further its political interests.

And so only a few weeks after the official publication of the 2020 rule in the Federal Register that December, President Biden issued an executive order directing the EPA to reconsider it. Suffice it to say that “the best available science” did not change between December 2020 and January 2021, with the exception of one new study that EPA itself describes as “narrow” and not useful for purposes of new “conclusions.” What did change, of course, was the occupant of the oval office, the leadership of the EPA, and the political imperative to satisfy the demands of the political left to tighten the environmental screws in every possible dimension regardless of the actual analytics. EPA now proposes “to revise the primary annual PM2.5 standard by lowering the level from 12.0 [micrograms per cubic meter] to within the range of 9.0 to 10.0 μg/m³ while taking comment on alternative annual standard levels down to 8.0 μg/m³ and up to 11.0 μg/m³.”

That last bit about considering an alternative “up to 11.0 μg/m³” is amusing; can anyone believe that this administration will be willing to invite opprobrium from the environmental left in an effort to make its standards a bit less unreasonable? In any event, EPA cannot claim any sort of PM2.5 health emergency as a rationale for rushing things: Between 2000-2021 national average ambient concentrations declined by 37 percent, to about 8.0 μg/m³ over the last five years. Bakst and Lewis note that the improvements have occurred in every region of the country, and U.S. PM2.5 levels are among the lowest in the world, lower by 20 percent than those in France, Germany, and the UK.

EPA states in the new proposed rule that various analyses of human and animal exposures to very high PM2.5 yield no actual evidence that current ambient concentrations create important mortality risks. EPA circumvents that problem by emphasizing “observational” studies that examine raw correlations without controlling for other important factors that might affect the relevant mortality statistics. Because PM2.5 is everywhere, everyone is exposed to it on a constant basis, so that simple correlations are deeply problematic in terms of drawing conclusions important for regulatory policy.

It gets worse. EPA claims billions of dollars of net benefits (Table 2) from a prospective tightening of the PM2.5 NAAQS, despite the weakness conceded by EPA with respect to the overall epidemiological evidence. How does EPA arrive at that conclusion? They take the nonsensical observational correlations noted above, attribute to PM2.5 as many as 570,000 U.S. deaths per year, and apply a value to each statistical lost life of $10 million. So in the never-never land of EPA “analysis,” there might be $5.7 trillion in economic benefits available. EPA actually claims a figure of up to $100 billion for net benefits depending on the policy chosen; they seem actually to believe that they are being conservative.

The $10 million figure is consistent with the academic literature, but it is deeply misleading, in that it necessarily is independent of the ages of the statistical individuals losing their lives, and other crucial factors central to the PM2.5 issue. To the extent that PM2.5 at current levels is responsible for actual premature deaths — a deeply dubious proposition — one would expect that such deaths would be concentrated among individuals older, less healthy overall, suffering from other adverse health conditions, in all likelihood poorer, and on and on. EPA makes no effort to control for such relevant factors — it may be impossible to do so on the basis of the simple correlations reported in the observational studies — a failure that does not inspire confidence in the rigor of the analysis underlying the proposed rule.

For those interested in ever-greater regulation, PM2.5 is a gold mine. Over many years, EPA has justified tightened regulations under the CAA by claiming PM2.5 “co-benefits” created by proposed regulations of other pollutants. One study in 2011 found that of 26 CAA regulations of other pollutants, asserted PM2.5 co-benefits accounted for more than half of the asserted net benefits of 21, and more than 99 percent of the asserted net benefits of 11.

Ever-tighter regulation of PM2.5 is a game designed to increase the political power of the EPA and its allies in the White House, in Congress, and among ideological, geographic, and industrial interest groups. It is deeply perverse in terms of its potential to constrain severely economic development in numerous regions of the country. But here we are."

The EPA’s Premature Proposal on Particulate Matter: Highlights from CEI’s Comment to the EPA

By Daren Bakst of CEI.

"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is jumping the gun by reconsidering the existing particulate matter (PM) air quality standards.

Under the Clean Air Act, the agency is required to review, and if appropriate, revise these standards on a five-year schedule.  At the end of 2020, after a thorough process, the EPA finalized its latest review and decided to retain the existing standards. 

But just six months later before the “ink could dry,” the agency announced its decision to reconsider the PM standards.  In January, the EPA published a proposed rule that would make the primary annual standards for fine particles (PM_2.5) more stringent.   

My colleague Marlo Lewis and I submitted a comment in response to the EPA’s proposed rule.  Here are some highlights from the comment:

The EPA Should Learn from the Ozone Reconsideration Process.  The EPA’s decision to reconsider the standards is a discretionary decision that is distinct from how the agency should set the standards. A lot can be learned from the agency’s decision to reconsider the 2008 ozone standards during the Obama administration.  In the comment, we explained: 

Instead of following the five-year review process established by Congress, the agency decided to propose a rule revising the ozone standards three years ahead of schedule.  In 2011, at the behest of President Barack Obama, OMB directed the EPA to withdraw what were going to be new and stricter ozone standards than the then-recently finalized 2008 standards.

President Obama was concerned with the economic recovery and trying to reduce regulatory burden.  He also didn’t want to ask “state and local governments to begin implementing a new standard that will soon be reconsidered.”  These same concerns apply now.

The current process also has implications for the application of sound science: 

If the EPA simply waited as it should to review, and if appropriate, revise the PM standards, keeping with the five-year time period, then it could do so based on an [Integrated Scientific Assessment] ISA that includes a newer and more extensive assessment of the science.  Instead, the EPA is rushing to revise the primary annual PM_2.5 standards based on the old 2019 ISA and a very limited supplemental document.   

Similarly, in 2011, the Obama administration pointed out that the EPA’s ozone reconsideration process would be relying on outdated data.  If the agency followed the five-year schedule for ozone, it could have the “best available science.”

The Purge of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC).   CASAC plays an important role in helping to set the PM standards. In 2021, the EPA took a shocking action in connection with CASAC that taints this entire reconsideration process:

On March 31, 2021, EPA Administrator Michael Regan dismissed all of the advisers from CASAC, as well as another statutorily required panel, the Science Advisory Board (SAB). Taking such unprecedented actions was initially being pushed in 2020 by former EPA employees opposed to Trump administration policies.  John Graham, who had led the EPA’s disbanded SAB, stated after this purge: “Now for the first time in the agency’s 50-year history, we have an administrator interested in scientific advice only from those scientists he has personally appointed.”

The dismissals took place before the agency announced its decision to initiate the current reconsideration process in June 2021, setting the stage for a reconsideration with CASAC support…

The proposal to lower the primary annual standard is inextricably bound with the EPA’s indefensible and arbitrary decisions connected to CASAC.  The proposal and the entire rule are arbitrary and capricious because the process informing them was arbitrary and capricious. 

Key Points Regarding the Science and Data.  The comment includes an in-depth look at many of the flaws connected to the science and data used in the proposed rule.  For example, there is a major problem of selection bias in which the agency ignored numerous peer-reviewed studies that don’t support the agency’s conclusions.  As we point out:

To overlook or depreciate peer-reviewed assessments contrary to the agency’s views “entirely fail[s] to consider an important aspect of the problem.” As the United States Supreme Court has explained, such a failure is normally a basis to conclude a rule is arbitrary and capricious.

Another problem is “the EPA does not attempt to address incongruous facts in the agency’s conclusions regarding PM that raise serious doubts about the lethality of PM_2.5 at today’s historically low levels.”  One incongruous fact we highlight:

Almost every country in the world has higher PM_2.5 concentrations than the United States [U.S. levels are about five times lower than the global average], yet many countries especially in the developed world, do not have lower life expectancies than the U.S.

This doesn’t disprove PM_2.5 health effects because many socioeconomic factors influence all-cause mortality risk.  However, this is the type of fact that requires the agency to at least attempt to provide an explanation.   

There are many more important points in the comment that we will highlight in the coming weeks. The bottom line though is what we wrote in the conclusion to the comment:

The American people deserve and expect that the EPA will make any decisions regarding PM in an objective manner based on the best available science.  Unfortunately, the EPA has not met these reasonable expectations and has proposed a rule that is arbitrary and capricious."

No, the SEC Can’t Regulate Climate Change

If Congress wanted to authorize that, it would have said so

By Donald Kochan.

"Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned more than 20 years ago that Congress doesn’t “hide elephants in mouseholes.” When Congress chooses not to pursue a certain policy or delegate a new authority, it isn’t inviting administrative agencies to step in and fill the empty space. But federal agencies are increasingly attempting to impose major climate regulations with no mandate from Congress.

In its June 2022 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court made clear that federal agencies may not assert “highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.” The EPA couldn’t find a provision in the Clean Air Act in which Congress gave the agency sweeping authority to restructure the country’s mix of electricity generation with its Clean Power Plan. Under the so-called major-questions doctrine, an agency action of political and economic significance—such as regulating carbon emissions—requires clear congressional authorization. The EPA didn’t have it, so the Clean Power Plan had to go.

With its recently proposed climate change policies, the Securities and Exchange Commission is similarly trying to exercise authority it doesn’t have. In an April 2022 rulemaking, the SEC proposed a set of expansive and costly regulations that would require public companies registered with the SEC to publish information about “climate-related risks” in annual reports and audited financial statements if those risks are “reasonably likely to have a material impact” on a company’s “business, results of operations, or financial condition.” The SEC also proposed requiring disclosure of registrants’ direct greenhouse-gas emissions as well as those from its purchases of electricity and its supply-chain partners.

This isn’t mere “disclosure.” It’s a heavy regulatory burden designed to serve climate policy goals, and it goes beyond the SEC’s statutory authority.

Climate change involves some of the biggest and most complicated policy debates of our day. A financial regulator empowered by Congress only to police fraud and protect investors isn’t equipped to engage with the policy questions surrounding climate change. That’s a mousehole of authority. There’s no room in it for a climate elephant to hide.

West Virginia v. EPA clearly poses a problem for the SEC’s climate proposal—and the commission knows it. Chairman Gary Gensler acknowledged that the case is “significant and meaningful,” and former Commissioner Joseph Grundfest noted that the SEC “was thrown for a loop” by the high court’s ruling. Nevertheless, the commission seems determined to dictate broad-reaching climate rules. In January, the SEC asserted that its climate disclosure requirements will be promulgated as a final rule in April 2023.

West Virginia v. EPA should serve as a clear warning to the SEC and other federal agencies—including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration—not to act outside their purviews. If Congress had wanted them to have such broad power, it would have given it to them.

Mr. Kochan is a professor and executive director of the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School."