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U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
- z991 1y agoTheir YouTube channel is equal parts fascinating, terrifying, and boring: https://youtube.com/@uscsb https://youtube.com/@uscsb
- nerdsniper 1y agoDefinitely worth watching! No matter if you’re technical or not. Top notch productions, beautiful even. I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work. Some of the smartest chemical engineers go on to work there later in their career. Due to the average age of the knowledge-holders, this isn’t an agency that you can shut down and easily restart. Young engineers don’t make good investigators - you need a super keen sense of industry to walk into a place where you don’t know anyone and put all the clues together correctly. The CSB produces very neutral but incredibly detailed reports. Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation. All they do is figure out why every major industrial disaster occurred and communicate that to other companies so that they have the know-how to prevent if from happening again if they so choose. The CSB’s reports are invaluable to the operations of so many companies and plants. Some of the top comments on a 1-year old video with 3.5 million views: > I can't believe that a government agency makes some of my favorite YouTube videos. I've been watching these for years now > Finally, a good use of my taxes > I work in the petrochemical industry, with polymerizable substances that are quite similar to butadiene. The findings hit home. I will share this video tomorrow with all my colleagues in the plant management, who I am sure will appreciate it. > An amazing service, thank you. When I worked at a copper mine in Yukon I would always replay your videos when it was my turn to give the safety brief and they were ALWAYS well received. Your videos save lives > USCSB is the only US government agency I have subscription notifications on for. You all have done fantastic work for these 25 years. > CONGRATULATIONS on 25 years to the CSB! A quarter century of excellence in safety education and investigations. I have learned so much about industrial processes and the safety measures utilized (sometimes not successfully) by industry thanks to the brilliant videos produced by the CSB. Thank you for your hard work, CSB! > This is hands down the most positive comment section on YouTube. I, and everyone else it seems, love this channel. I’ve learned so much > Thank you CSB for all that you do. As an engineer and new supervisor at a production facility, I utilize your videos all the time to help teach the operators the dangers that we have lurking. You improve and save lives all over due to your work. Please, keep it up. > Love the analysis and insights to these industrial disasters that the USCSB provides. Hope you stay well funded to continue commissioning these mini documentaries.
- supplied_demand 1y ago== I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work== It feels like there is some type of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia that goes on with government spending and programs. Those close to the subject matter typically view government spending in their area of expertise as necessary, even “incredible” as you state. When it comes to spending in an area they are not an expert, it suddenly becomes “wasteful.”
- nerdsniper 1y agoI mean, I also now work at a public university and can nearly taste the waste in projects I’m directly involved in.
- pstuart 1y agoIt often gets framed as a "government problem", but private enterprise is not immune to these problems either. It's almost like it's a natural result of any organization that is too large for direct accountability and uses funds that they have no personal stake in.
- PostOnce 1y agoboring and/or utterly fascinating, depending on the viewer -- safety engineering, whether that's airplanes, submarines, chemical plants, or whatever, is totally fascinating. Making something work is difficult, making it work safely, even more so.
- q3k 1y agoDirect from the CSB: > The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress. Source: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
- hecanjog 1y agoThis claims the EPA and OSHA already perform the same duties, is that actually true?
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Chemical_Safety_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Chemical_Safety_Board > The Senate legislative history states: "The principal role of the new chemical safety board is to investigate accidents to determine the conditions and circumstances which led up to the event and to identify the cause or causes so that similar events might be prevented." Congress gave the CSB a unique statutory mission and provided in law that no other agency or executive branch official may direct the activities of the board.
- Retric 1y agoIn practice it’s got a very distinct role. They basically do NTSB aircraft crash investigations for large scale chemical accidents. Critically they don’t assign fines or act proactively like EPA or OSHA, it’s a neutral investigation.
- photochemsyn 1y agoNo - "The CSB investigates industrial chemical accidents—not to assign blame, but to figure out why they happened and how to prevent them. No other federal agency does this kind of root cause analysis focused purely on safety improvement. OSHA and the EPA enforce rules, but they don’t specialize in deep, systems-based investigations like the CSB does."
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- pixl97 1y agoSave lives?: X Increase safety?: X Make more money?: YES The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.
- api 1y agoI wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity. Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
- qmatch 1y agoHow are so confident in causality here?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- api 1y agoThe population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained. There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.
- qmatch 1y agoI see your point, but not totally buying it. The US innovates for a global population, one that’s still growing. The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.
- Arubis 1y agoIn the name of efficiency, we should just ignite the vinyl chloride in the freight trains before they even leave the station.
- vpribish 1y agoYou have to check out their incredible safety investigation videos on youtube. I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are but clearly their role needs to be played by someone - and as a taxpayer I appreciate that they are doing it in a way that educates and informs.
- Hawxy 1y ago> I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are They're 50 employees with an annual budget of $14.4 million. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago[flagged]
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- SoftTalker 1y ago[flagged]
- Rebelgecko 1y agoWhy would they want to fund a group that calls them out for taking deadly shortcuts to save money?
- almosthere 1y agoThat's how the FDA works, so, should we just shut them down?
- jmcgough 1y agoThere are chemicals that are routinely used but aren't considered foods or drugs
- jmye 1y agoOh good, we can save money to pay for like, 1/5000 of another parade no one will attend. So much fiscal responsibility.
- drjolly 1y agoI think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again. Yeah, dump in the rivers, dump in the woods, just drive around in circles dumping in an empty lot. You don’t need masks- give everyone cancer and blow some shit up, maybe get some acid burns. Super-fund sites? When was the last one we had anyway- we need more of ‘em- lots more! Let’s let the kids eat the lead paint and complain of the smells wafting into their cars from the chemical, paper, etc. plants on road trips, just like the olden days!
- absurdo 1y ago[flagged]
- userbinator 1y ago[flagged]
- vkou 1y agoStrangely enough, I'm not seeing anyone lining up to take $3/hr jobs sewing t-shirts for sale to China.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago[flagged]
- tehwebguy 1y ago[flagged]
- heavyset_go 1y ago> The US saw how China rose to dominate manufacturing, and would like to go back to being a manufacturing power again. If that were the case, the US would be dumping trillions into spinning up manufacturing like China did. The US has the power to do this, they did it during WWII, and like it or not, this current era requires heavy strategic investments that may not produce returns for decades, if at all. It's what China is doing and if the US were trying to compete, they'd do the same. We were getting somewhat close to this with the CHIPS Act, but that's on the chopping block[1], too. Truth is US capital is happy to sell off manufacturing capability to cash in on cheap labor, and there is no monetary incentive to re-shore manufacturing capacity unless the government provides serious incentives or does it themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subsequent_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...
- kumarvvr 1y agoIt is highly surprising that the narrative in the US has morphed the expenses on public institutions of enormous importance, into wastage, something that has to be cut or eliminated. Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world? The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money. Somethings cannot be measured by money. In fact, when it comes to public governance, money is the least useful thing.
- gottorf 1y ago> public institutions of enormous importance A case of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater, I suppose. And make no mistake: there was enough dirty bathwater to go around.
- supplied_demand 1y ago== And make no mistake: there was enough dirty bathwater to go around== Any evidence to share?
- kumarvvr 1y agoSome waste is expected in govt. It happens even in private enterprises. That is down to human nature and other factors. However, where is the critical thinking and debate on what actually the institution does, what can be improved and what can be changed? Its all become X uses Y billion USD a year, so we have to make ti Y/2 to save the universe.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoOkay, I won't make a mistake if you show me the evidence.
- meepmorp 1y agoobviously, we need to drain the swamp to get rid of the dirty bathwater that we're now dumping there
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- dboreham 1y agoWaiting for when smoking is allowed on planes again...
- Applejinx 1y agoOh, required, surely.
- meepmorp 1y ago[flagged]
- monkeyelite 1y agoInteresting conservative take. Why change or try anything new? Everything must have been made for some reason.
- bravesoul2 1y agoRandomly knocking out bricks of your house so you can sell them for 50c each to help pay the mortgage is not innovation.
- monkeyelite 1y agoSaying this thing is here so it must be important is not governance or wisdom. Just say why it’s a good idea.
- bravesoul2 1y agoThat is not the lesson of chestertons fence. What you describe is cargo cult. Chesterton fence says "stop! think". What doge and Trump are doing is destroying stuff they don't understand.
- monkeyelite 1y agoHow do you know that?
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- BurningFrog 1y ago[flagged]
- spauldo 1y agoIt's pretty important for anyone working around chemicals. I work around truck racks and pump houses and giant fuel tanks all day, and I'm rather glad I don't need to worry about being blown 100 feet in the air in an explosion and leave my family behind like my great uncle did. The reason I don't worry is because, partly due to the CSB, we're pretty good at knowing how to work around explosive liquids safely. Everyone gets hung up on money and they don't pay attention to value. The CSB annual budget is less than some of the contracts I work on, automating fuel farms on military bases. They're good value for money.
- BurningFrog 1y agoThe stated motivation is that the bureaucratic structure is redundant, so ideally the good work they do will be continued in another agency.
- spauldo 1y agoYeah, I'm not holding my breath. It's just people's lives at stake, I figure it'll go on the backburner.
- CaliforniaKarl 1y agoWhen something happens, the real cause of the problem is often due to a combination of the entity (the company/person/whatever that had the "something" happen), as well as external factors. Those external factors can include rules/guidance—or the lack of rules/guidance—from multiple agencies. If a regulatory agency is also doing investigations, they may choose to focus less on their own 'failings' (that is, their agency's rules/guidance or lack of rules/guidance), and focus more on others' failings. Or, they may choose to focus less on other agencies' failings for political reasons. Having a third party, with no regulatory ability, helps to reduce the appearance of bias, and increase trust in the industry that the third party investigates.
- charcircuit 1y agoMuch more cutting is required to balance the budget.
- CSMastermind 1y agoThere's simply no balancing the budget without both raising taxes and cutting social services. We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
- c0nducktr 1y agoWhat social spending do you want to cut?
- CSMastermind 1y agoSocial security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ~60% of the federal budget. Interest payments are another ~15% and there's no way to reduce those. You could cut literally every penny of the rest of the budget, including all of defense, all of transportation, all of education, and every single program being discussed here. We'd still have a deficit. So unless a politician is going to propose a way to spend less on those three programs, then they're not talking seriously about reducing our deficit.
- watwut 1y agoThey are cutting social spending and healthcare spending. It wont offset tax cuts for the rich, but the cruelty is the point and watching people suffer is fun to republicans.
- wvenable 1y agoPenny wise but pound foolish.
- pjc50 1y agoBut there's always money for a war.
- juancampa 1y agoThe article mentions redundancy but doesn't specify what organization is claimed to make CSB redundant. I'm guessing it's the NIH since, to be fair, Vance announced an investigation into the East Palestine chemical spill five days ago: https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research-east-palestine-ohio-train-disaster.html https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research...
- sciencesama 1y agoWhat advantages can we take with this !?
- hliyan 1y agoI think we will soon have to confront serious, real world proof that an unregulated free market is not ultimately self-regulating. Control systems without upper bounds (e.g. shareholder value / profit maximization) are prone to feedback loops and oscillations. And an oscillating system cannot be judged in its entirety during an upward cycle alone (20th century). Going one level of abstraction higher: there is no evidence that demand/supply dynamics alone will regulate a society over larger populations and time scales. Even the phrase "invisible hand" appears only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, somewhere around page 500, and that refers not to the market at large, but to the emergence of protectionist behaviours among suppliers within a country. Laws and regulations are part of the free market system. As rules approach zero, competition approaches war.
- ourmandave 1y agoLaws and regulations are part of the free market system. I thought we've known since well before the 1952 Cuyahoga River fire that sparked the formation of the EPA. Although TBF, there's never been a lot of demand for literal burning rivers.
- CogitoCogito 1y agoI'm pretty sure we've actually known this since time immemorial. Property, contract, etc. are all legal constructs. Talking about free markets (or whatever approximation to "free" is meant by that) without laws and regulations doesn't make any sense.
- const_cast 1y agoWe already have real-world proof of this which is why regulations were slowly (and bloodily) introduced in the first place. It's the same tragedy of the commons we see with vaccinations. Vaccinations work, so we then forget why we had them in the first place, so then we think "well... what if we just stop?"
- JackYoustra 1y agoCertified doge moment. Waiting for all of the people who said that doge would lead to increased efficiency (or at the very least a smaller deficit) to say they're wrong.
- caseysoftware 1y agoAdmittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important: "The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause." Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
- KindOne 1y agoTrain Derailment is for FRA / NTSB. CSB is for manufacturing / processing incidents.
- caseysoftware 1y agoGot it. Found the EPA reporting on the trail derailment too. It looks like the distinction is whether the potential source is stationary or not. Which reinforces the "duplication" point. Remove the distinction for the EPA and you have the need covered.
- dehrmann 1y agoPolitics is complicated and often has competing goals, but this seems at odds with the equally loud MAHA movement.
- Applejinx 1y agoOnly if you assume the respective movements can be taken at face value. If this and MAHA are actually for the purpose of destroying functional things, in the manner that missile strikes are for destroying functional things, then none of this is at odds with anything else: the purpose is just more aligned with the result than with the claimed intentions.
- r0ckarong 1y agomake AMERICA the FIRST world country with the most third world disasters
- nullc 1y agoI love the USCSB videos and in couple incidents I likely protected myself and others from an accident due to risk awareness I had as a result of their videos. (e.g. most recently the realization that few micron tungsten powder might be significantly pyrophoric at elevated temperature-- which it is). I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known. But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more). So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient. It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly. That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.
- conorjh 1y ago[dead]
- pif 1y ago> the CSB is an independent federal agency Keyword: "independent". They investigate before talking. They narrate the fact instead of reading the official narrative. Those pesky wokes must go.
- smeeger 1y agowhat will they do next, revoke the patriot act?! how unpatriotic!
- desperate 1y agoThis is horrible news. The USCSB does incredible work.
- jimbohn 1y agoChesterton's Fence moment
- mrguyorama 1y agoNo not really. The people in charge KNOW what the CSB does, that's why they want it gone The CSB makes it known how much your employer is willing to kill you over saving like ten bucks. Chemistry industry executives don't like that. Do you HONESTLY believe that these people who have spent the past 60 years crying about how much the EPA makes their business "harder" (literally 1% more expensive) don't know exactly how the EPA protects the public from them? They don't care that their actions literally kill people. They don't care. Dupont did not care at all that they were dumping PFOAs that they confirmed were acutely and chronically toxic to mammals upstream of a small town's drinking water. They do not care. Executives don't make money for caring.
- doka_smoka 1y agoI would leave the funding as long as they make MORE videos than one a year. With all the AI tools coming out they should be able to produce much fantastic content. I can't count the number of times I've referred our site EHS managers throughout the years to their Youtube. Or, I guess, cut the funding, and next Dupont or Deridder or Bhopal, we will just shrug and hope the company responsible for the incident is transparent and forthcoming in their internal investigation /s
- 2Gkashmiri 1y agoHot take: The United states of america MAGA movement wants to compete with taliban in turning their countries 500 or even 900 years back. Who will win? Not really sure. Its a touch and go situation and it can turn any either way and emerge as the winner
- esbranson 1y agoWe're getting reset to modern Europe: there is no equivalent to the US CSB in any major European country. France's BEA-RI is not independent, and the CSB is not EPA or OSHA. I'm always amazed how little commenters know about the US, and deeply saddened by how much less they know about others.
- nopelynopington 1y agoI hope someone is keeping a list of all these crazy rollbacks so the next democrat administration (assuming there is one dun-dun-dun etc) can be held accountable for not rolling back the rollbacks. Even if they do I'm worried that this kind of sabotage of progress will become the new norm, with each subsequent administration undoing everything the previous one did as standard, and going even further to appease the extremists. I know this has always happened to some degree with executive orders (the was a great tradition of presidents signing all sorts of crazy stuff just so the next guy would have to undo it and look bad) but it seems nuclear now (sometimes literally)