Little-noticed law lurks over environmental protections.

* Little-noticed law lurks over environmental protections: A range of U.S. regulations protecting the environment and public health, including the Roadless Area Conservation Rule protecting federal forests, are in danger of being overturned by means of a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress are threatening to wield the CRA to undo much of former president Bill Clinton's final work on this front.

Hoping to solidify his legacy as a defender of the environment, heath and labor, President Clinton signed stricter pollution rules for diesel fuel, workplace protection standards and--perhaps the most far-reaching environmental regulation of his two-term presidency--a ban on commercial logging and road-building on more than 58 million acres of federal forest land, including areas of Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Scheduled to take effect March 13, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was postponed for further review by the Bush administration, and with the help of the Congressional Review Act, might be permanently curtailed.

Passed in 1996, the CRA was largely ignored until this March, when it was used for the first time to axe the newly crafted Occupational Health and Safety Administration's (OSHA) workplace ergonomic rules. The product of more than ten years of rsearch and debate, the rules would have helped protect workers from on-the-job injuries such as carpel tunnel syndrome, back sprains, and other repetitive stress injuries.

Tagged on as a provision to the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996, the CRA gives Congress 60 session days to review and--if it chooses--to reject federal agency rules. Because the CRA allows for special expedited procedures that limit floor debate and prohibit filibusters, Congress was able to quickly "disapprove" the rules for workplace protection by a simple vote. Now set to go to President Bush's desk, the resolution will likely be signed, making the ergonomic standards effectively disappear.

Environmentalists fear that the CRA will be one of many tools used by the Republican administration to thwart the implementation of safeguards protecting the environment, consumers, and workers. Just after Bush was sworn in as President, his Chief of Staff, Andrew Card Jr., issued a memo to federal agency heads postponing for 60 days the date of any new regulation that had not been published in the Federal Register, and requiring agencies to withdraw new safety standards that had been signed by the Clinton administration but not yet published. Without official publication in the Federal Register, rules and orders signed while Clinton was in office are not considered official public law and agencies have no responsibility to enforce their measures. According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, the Card memo endangers rules for monitoring the environmental and health effects of genetically engineered crops, national standards for organic food, mine safety, wetlands protection, childhood lead poisoning, the ban on forest road-building, and other standards promulgated shortly before the Clinton administration ended.