Report: EPA used decades-old data to make regulations

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicates that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used 20-year-old data while assessing the impact of some of its regulations on employment levels:

The data, which dated from 1979 to 1991, was used as recently as June 2013.

As the GAO report dryly noted, without updated data, the regulatory impact analyses "may be limited in their usefulness." This revelation is a boon to EPA critics, who often charge that the agency's regulations protect the environment at the expense of the economy. The EPA has most recently been challenged on this front by farmers, electrical workers, and coal miners.

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