You are comparing apples to oranges. To my understanding, aviation is the only regulatory agency with the power to issue huge sweeping new regulations in weeks.
I can’t think of another example.
Most regulation takes months or years to change and normally has legally required periods of commercial and public consultation.
As I just said in my post before this I am not sure they even can if they wanted to.
I find myself in a position of looking like I am defending this shitty situation. I’m not. Really.
I was just rebutting the silly notion they have done nothing. 
I mean there’s an easy way out of this. Stop reflexively defending noted shitbag Mayor Pete.
I thought we started off with “they’ve done everything they possibly can” versus “no they have not”
I’m defending what actually happened, not pete.
Anyway, I’m done now. It’s close to impossible to have a real discussion anymore. It’s a bummer.
Cheers
That’s a lot of soul reading. This is a DOT regulation and the kind of thing that every administration “swings” on. It’s what administrations are there to do. Not doing it is pretty consistent with his actions on the rail strike, so it seems more likely that Biden didn’t want to do this regulation because he and Mayor Pete sided with the Railroad companies.
Are you suggesting that the Obama rule took 6 or 7 years to put into place because they were careful bureaucrats? Well, even if that were true, and it took a while to study the issue, that would have been done when Biden was VP and he wouldn’t have had to study it for years. But, it’s not true.
The Obama administration imposed tougher safety regulations Friday for trains carrying crude oil, responding to growing alarm about a series of fiery derailments that killed dozens of people in a small Canadian town and have rattled U.S. communities from North Dakota to Alabama to Virginia.
and in 2013 the huge rail disaster in Canada
Obama responded to rail disasters and didn’t take 7 years to do something, Trump undid it, and Biden, Mayor Pete and Alan Shaw left Trump rules as is. It wasn’t fear that enacting a brake safety rule on railroads would be some kind of unprecedented wild political action that stopped Biden. He was happy that industry was happy and, like Obama, wasn’t going to do anything at all unless there was a big public disaster forcing his hand.
I believe the Biden administration can have fallen well short of doing everything possible while doing enough to not be evil.
Is that true? Is the regulatory authority of the FRA drastically different from the FAA? They were created at the same time by the same act of Congress. I can certainly believe that they don’t generally exercise what authority they do have as assertively as the FAA, but is that because the FRA lacks the authority of the FAA or because they’re more regulatory captured by the railroads?
I think the Biden administration feels that it can’t win a major fight with the railroad companies, so isn’t going to do the political equivalent of inducing nuclear war.
They don’t have to have a political fight to enact regulations at the DOT. Those rules are easy to enact, but fragile because they can be easily undone by subsequent administrations. Ok, fragile. But easy to enact. And their interest in fighting the railroad companies would be more believable if they didn’t affirmatively go out of their way to act as industry henchmen in the rail workers strike.
I hate that you feel this way, but my interpretation of what has happened here in this thread is extemely different to yours
Bad as Mayo Pete is, he’s better than Obama’s Secretaries of Transportation, at least one of them anyway. The first was a Republican who left in disgrace after accepting a $50k bribe for personal home repairs and the second went on to work for Lyft on the campaign to exclude gig workers from minimum wage, employee health care requirements and the right to organize.
I’m trying to see how Pete is better
Fair. I feel like I started by refuting the idea they did nothing which Chris stated. I pointed out given the current regulatory framework they did everything they could so far.
This got turned into me supposedly claiming their actions prior to the accident were defensible, that there was nothing that can be done to fix the broken regulatory regime going forward or that pete is a good guy. None of which I feel like I said at all.
Article about this from David Sirota and others:
“We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015),” Buttigieg wrote.
Buttigieg’s tweet refers to a law passed by Congress in 2015 — at the urging of the railroad industry — requiring the executive branch to conduct cost-benefit analysis of the ECP brake rule before enacting it.
Trump used that law to kill the braking rule, but the cost-benefit analysis his administration used to do so was subsequently discredited.
…
The spokesperson said proposing a new rule would require performing a new cost-benefit analysis, though they acknowledged that the department has the ability to prepare that analysis.
In 2018, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) demanded exactly that from the Transportation Department.
A coalition of environmental organizations has also been asking the department to redo the analysis. After the Trump administration rescinded the braking rule, groups including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice appealed the decision, citing the flawed analysis and asking the Transportation Department to prepare a new one. The appeal is still pending.
“We had hoped to see this issue move forward under the Biden administration,” said Kristen Boyles, a managing attorney at Earthjustice. “It’s not clear that it’s a priority.”
Rail law and regulatory experts interviewed by the Lever agreed that Buttigieg’s Transportation Department can and should redo that analysis to allow for a reinstatement of the braking rule.
“The Federal Railroad Administration’s mission is to promote rail safety,” said John Risch, a retired railroad worker and former legislative director of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transport Workers union, referring to an agency within the Transportation Department. “If they believe that ECP brakes are essential to rail safety, they could require ECP brakes on certain trains or whatever they want to do.”
Risch added that nothing prevents Buttigieg from using his existing rulemaking authority to expand the definition of a “high-hazard flammable train” to cover trains like the one in Ohio.
You know, executive stuff! Why even have a fucking executive branch if the only possible remedies to anything are legislative?
The problem here is the fundamental problem with Pete, which is that he is a nerd who is heavily focused on his own career advancement, and that both of these things make him disinclined to rock the boat or have political showdowns with powerful interests.
Impossible to have a discussion, lol
again, I said nothing about what they had done before the accident.
Also Pete is a professional politician and messaging and leadership are part of that job. If there are things you’re doing behind the scenes but this is not being communicated to the public effectively, then you’re failing at that part of your job. But Pete is actually pretty good at messaging so I don’t think that’s the problem here.
The article is arguing that these things should be done now?
and they should but even if they did the cost benefit analysis themselves it’s not going to take three weeks.
Then there is the fine point , that apparently the former regs wouldn’t have applied because not enough of the cars carried hazchems to qualify for the improved breaking (think Dewine remarked about this)
So the real point is that the regulatory process is completely infected by the train industry.
It’s not rocket science, people know how to reduce train accidents. The industry just doesn’t want to pay what that costs (it’s gotta be cheaper than the accidents but whatever). And the industry has won all the relevant legislative and bureaucratic fights.