I remember when in the early 1980s, Susan and Martin Tolchin started reporting in the New York Times on how the Reagan administration was instituting sweeping changes to the regulatory reach of the federal government. The articles were shocking. Their book that followed, Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate (1983), surveyed the evisceration of the regulatory state. Less polemical books and articles by others followed over the years as researchers tracked the effects of the movement to deregulate. The litany of regulatory lapses became quite long. In recent years, the public clamor for regulatory protection has grown as regulatory failure has left the economy in shambles, exposed consumers to major health risks, and put our environment at peril.

The People's Agents and Battle to Protect the American Public is therefore a timely contribution to this field, detailing what has happened since the Reagan Revolution regarding the agencies regulating health, safety, and the environment: the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This book, however, is much more than an update. It offers a scholarly and sobering assessment that is crucial for understanding why the agencies concerned with health and safety continue to fail to live up to their promise to provide the protections most Americans favor. The book offers serious scholarship that explains the forces at work producing regulatory failure and the risks such failure poses to our individual and collective well-being. Further, the recommendations in the concluding chapter as to what should be done about this sad situation are provocative, to say the least (something I will return to at the end).

Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro draw their readers in with a first chapter that highlights some of the most significant regulatory lapses in the health and safety field in the years since the 1980s. We get to hear about the lumbering FDA that is too slow to approve needed drugs but then fails to stop Vioxx from causing an estimated 88,000–139,000 heart attacks and strokes while on the market for just five years (1999–2004). During that short period, the manufacturer Merck had annual sales that topped $2.5 billion.

Then there is the miserably understaffed OSHA that failed to oversee McWane, Inc., which employed 5,000 workers in 12 plants making cast-iron sewer pipes; the result was three workers dead due to the some of the very same violations the company had incurred between 1995 and 2003 when it was cited more than 400 times. OSHA might be excused because it was not only underfunded and understaffed due to budget cuts from Congress but was also preoccupied with responding repeatedly to an overly meddlesome judiciary. For example, it spent 15 years finally convincing the courts that it needed to tighten the permissible levels for cancer-causing benzene.

The travails of OSHA are countered by the “conscious avoidance” approach of the NHTSA in dealing with the rollover problem of sport utility vehicles, which became the single major cause of the US decline in traffic safety from first to ninth place worldwide over the last 30 years. Then there is the CPSC's failure to get a grip on preventing lead in toys, given that 80% of the toys purchased in the United States today come from abroad, the vast majority from China. For years, the EPA has been weighed down with directives it cannot possibly shoulder, even with 17,000 employees in the 10 federal regions and a dozen labs. Yet since the 1980s, its failure, and even resistance, to doing what by law it is required to do to contain carbon pollution is due in part to a lack of presidential leadership, that making it complicit in global warming and adverse climate change. The litany of monumental health and safety failures goes on and on.

The authors mercifully just show us this tip of the iceberg called bureaucratic paralysis, preferring instead to examine the health and safety regulatory quagmire in a more systematic manner. As their title suggests, they provide an analysis that relies on principal–agent theory to underscore the fact that these regulatory agencies are agents who must serve many masters: the president, Congress, the courts, and US citizens, which is their constitutional responsibility. This situation often puts agencies in the unenviable position of working at cross-purposes. In the wake of mixed messages and conflicting directives, agencies often drift along in ways counterproductive to the process of legislation, executive oversight, or judicial decisions. The muddle creates significant opportunities for agency capture whereby agencies start out as regulators of industry but end up becoming their protectors, as Marver Bernstein and many others have insightfully suggested over the years.

Steinzor and Shapiro isolate key factors that have turned the health and safety agencies into increasingly vulnerable political prey. They document empirically how the hollowing out of the federal government in the years since the Reagan Revolution has contributed to significant underfunding and understaffing of these agencies. They provide a highly informative description of the process of deciding on the viability of proposed regulations according to cost–benefit analysis, which has been in place since President Reagan prohibited agencies from proposing or adopting rules until they are reviewed by economists at the White House Office of Regulatory Affairs—another impediment to effective regulation. The underfunded agencies divert limited resources again and again to a flawed methodological process that frequently leads them away from instituting needed regulations, all in the name of having to prove that regulations are not destructive of business opportunities.

The heart of the book analyzes how presidents, Congress, and the courts over time have come to be troublesome sources of conflicting directives that affect the ability of the health and safety agencies to do their jobs. For instance, presidents have at times used political appointment power to undercut the regulatory independence of the EPA, but this politicization is juxtaposed against the equally frustrating tales of bureaucratic ossification within agencies such as the NHTSA. Congress has systematically and intentionally left the funding and staffing needs of these agencies hanging on the political vine, as indicated by the sad story of the long-neglected Superfund to clean up environmentally hazardous industrial sites. The authors effectively demonstrate that a new posture among judges shows an increased willingness to intervene in agency rulemaking, creating an opening for ideological bias to influence health and safety regulation in disconcerting ways, with Republican appointees consistently undercutting the ability of agencies to do their jobs. Yet the biggest surprise in the book is how the courts, under the leadership of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, have moved to a very strict interpretation of the standing of citizens to question the failure to adopt rules as called for by legislation. The result of this narrow understanding of standing to sue creates a catch-22 whereby citizens cannot sue any agency for its failure to adopt rules called for by legislation until they have suffered from that failure.

What are we to do about all this bureaucratic paralysis, presidential politicizing, congressional neglect, and judicial intrusion? Steinzor and Shapiro insightfully note that reform must begin with the principals rather than with the agents. Congress must overcome its partisan gridlock; presidents must stop politicizing health and safety regulation; and ideologically biased rulings from the courts have to be reduced and more opportunities created for citizens to sue agencies to do their jobs. Consistent with these principal reforms, the agents need to change as well. They need to be much better at demonstrating outcomes according to the appropriate indicators, rather than just producing puff pieces in glossy annual reports. They need to find ways to separate science from politics and create the empirical foundations for taking needed actions. They need to manage themselves in a streamlined fashion.

While Steinzor and Shapiro doubt that the glory days of health and safety regulation will ever return, they are optimistic that if we can find the political will, we can do better. I hope they are right but the evidence remains to be seen. The book begins and ends with suggestions that the presidency of Barack Obama gives us reason to hope. That was written in 2010. Now it is 2012. After all the political bickering in Washington since Obama was elected, there are good reasons to think that nothing much will change in the area of health and safety regulation until Democrats regain control of all three branches—something the Constitution makes unlikely on the assumption that one-party government is actually bad. Yet given all the compelling evidence this book provides, it resists explicitly stating what is needed to truly exit the regulatory crisis: a government led by people committed to enforcing the law rather than undermining it.