Greenpeace Presses Obama on CFATS

Last Friday, Greenpeace and a coalition of other environmental, labor and social activist organizations addressed a letter to President Obama encouraging him to get behind passage of HR 2868 and HR 3258, specifically urging him to “to support H.R. 2868 and H.R. 3258 (as introduced) along with any strengthening Amendments”. The President and CFATS As I noted last April when the White House web page dropped the promise to “work with all stakeholders to enact permanent federal chemical security regulations”, it does not seem that CFATS is currently a high priority for the Obama Administration. When they put a one-year extension of CFATS in their Homeland Security Budget, it should have convinced even the most ardent supporter of the expansion of CFATS that this was low on the President’s list of priorities. To be perfectly fair, President Obama has a lot of problems that he and his administration have to deal with. The economy is still on fragile ground, and he has picked two controversial programs to be the hallmark of his first year in office, prevention of global warming and universal health care. It is understandable if he has decided to put the CFATS fight off for another year. Misplaced Political Pressure To be sure, Greenpeace and their associate organizations have spent little political capital in sending this letter to the President. But is this the way to really get anything done? I doubt it. This ranks right up there with the letter last summer to Senator Collins asking her to support HR 5577, a bill that had little chance (none in hind sight) of getting to the Senate. As with last year, the bill needs to be broken out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Last year it was stalled there because of opposition to the bill by the Committee leadership. This year it looks more to be a workload issue; Energy and Commerce is a key committee in both the global warming and health care legislation. The committee staff is spending time on those two issues, not CFATS. And this is the reason that it particularly counterproductive to ask the President to pressure Congress to get moving on CFATS. At this point CFATS is being held up by his two pet projects. It will take much more that a letter or two from supporters to get him to change his priorities. That effort is bound to fail.