OpenMarket: April 2020

Now that government officials and business owners are planning for a “semi-normal” phase of post-quarantine reopening, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s recent “Implementing a National Return to Work Plan” letter to members outlines several legal and regulatory issues the organization believes need to be addressed by policy makers.

The Federal Register, the official daily government publication of regulations, proposed rules, and similar items did not go online today. We were awaiting today’s Federal Register in order to file a lawsuit challenging the new federal auto fuel economy rules. Now we’ll have to wait a bit.

It’s been almost a month since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Final Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE...

Launching another antitrust investigation into Amazon won’t benefit consumers. The U.S. antitrust law standard is consumer harm. To stretch antitrust investigations to include data, privacy, or protect the interests of competitors would rewrite law and introduce chaos.

Over the past month, CEI and others have pointed to #NeverNeeded regulations that are hindering our response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to economic dislocation. Now CEI has joined with other industry and policy groups to petition the Securities and Exchange Commission to cease regulatory actions that were not only #NeverNeeded, but never authorized.

S. Fred Singer, distinguished scientist and leading climate skeptic, died on April 6 in Rockville, Maryland, at age 95. He had a long and varied academic and government career before he became one of the early prominent scientists to speak out against global warming alarmism.

Tracing of individuals and other measures involving artificial intelligence are in the news with respect to managing individuals’ reentry into the economy in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. The COVID-19 outbreak presents relevant concerns with respect to new authority potentially being handed to agencies, whose agendas may not align with individual rights or privacy concerns. 

New unemployment applications were down to 4.4 million last week. This is still more than an order of magnitude greater than the pre-coronavirus record. With roughly 26 million people now claiming benefits, the unemployment rate is likely now at Great Depression-era levels. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies issued new final regulations ranging light-duty vehicles to golden parakeets.

Planet of the Humans, the new documentary film from director Jeff Gibbs and executive producer Michael Moore, contains a stunning evisceration of so-called green energy and the people profiting from it.

The Department of Justice’s Energy and Natural Resources Division published a report on Earth Day detailing its accomplishments to enforce the nation’s environmental, public lands, and natural resource laws, defend executive agency prerogatives under federal statutory and constitutional law, and support regulatory reform, energy infrastructure development, and national security.