Yesterday’s unanimous ruling by a federal appeals court striking down Bush administration rules governing the work hours of truck drivers provides a revealing window showing how the conservative movement’s “smart regulation” approach is nothing more than a ruse to boost corporate profits while putting public health and safety at greater risk. In this case, the relevant agency imposed an increase in the maximum allowable driving hours for truckers – from 60 hours to 77 over 7 consecutive days, and from 70 to 88 over 8 days. The rules would have increased the maximum period of consecutive driving from 10 hours to 11 before taking a rest time.

Here are some of the key components of the right’s “smart regulation” boondoggle as manifested in this particular example, but which have been emulated and left almost entirely unchecked throughout the executive branch since Inauguration day, 2001:

Appoint Foxes to the Henhouse: As documented by the New York Times’ Stephen Labaton in a superb piece last December, the Bush-Cheney transition team included Duane W. Acklie, chairman of the American Trucking Associations, and Walter B. McCormick Jr., the ATA’s president. Michael P. Jackson, a former senior vice president at the ATA, was appointed to be deputy secretary of the Department of Transportation. And Joseph M. Clapp, the former chairman of Roadway and the leader of an industry foundation that sponsored research claiming that fatigue was not a factor in truck accidents, was chosen to lead the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration – the agency that lost yesterday’s decision. And of course, Cheney strongman David Addington was a trucking industry official in an earlier life. Labaton found that from 2000 to 2006, the trucking industry contributed more than $14 million to Republican candidates, and the industry’s anti-regulatory donations and lobbying fees combined amounted to about $37 million.

Think Outside the Box: The cost-benefit analysis that the FMCSA used in developing its original regulations, issued in 2003, assumed that time spent driving is equally fatiguing as time spent resting. That is, a driver who has been driving for 10 hours has the same risk of crashing as a driver who has been resting for 10 hours, then begins to drive. Counterintuitive, no? The agency explained that its model disregarded the effects of “time on task” because it did not have sufficient data on the magnitude of such effects. But after a court previously struck down those rules, the agency’s modified regulations (the ones rejected yesterday) included numbers demonstrating that the assumption was as absurd as it seemed. Numbers derived from fatal truck crashes between 1991-2002 showed that the risk that a crash will be fatigue-related ranges from 1% for hour 1, to 4.4% for hour 10, to 9.6% for hour 11, to 25% for hour 13 and beyond – an exponential increase.

Play Cost-Benefit Tricks: In its revised rules, FMCSA relied on cost-benefit analysis to show that if the 11th hour of driving were eliminated, productivity losses would dwarf benefits. According to its calculations, which were not substantiated in any way by the agency, prohibiting the 11th hour would cost the industry $586 million per year. In calculating the costs associated with fatal crashes that would occur in the eleventh hour, the agency used a “crash-risk multiplier” that was only 30 percent higher than the 10th hour – even though the data showed the risk of a fatal crash more than doubled from the 10th hour to the 11th. If you’re interested, there’s plenty more of that sort of thing to read about in this brief from Public Citizen, which really lived up to its name in pursuing this case. Dishonestly manipulating cost-benefit analysis has become standard practice in the Bush administration, a practice perfected over decades in well-funded right-wing think tanks, university centers, and industry associations. And it’s quite literally killing us. In any case, the mission of the agency is to improve highway safety and protect driver health, not goose industry profits.

Whatever the Rules, Don’t Enforce Them: Toward the tail end of the Clinton administration, the FMSCA issued regulations that would have required the installation of electronic devices to replace driver’s logs to verify compliance. Those changes were dropped by the Bush administration, of course, and, as Labaton wrote: “The practice of falsifying driver hours is an open secret in the industry; truckers routinely refer to their logs as ‘comic books.’ Fines are small. The federal motor carrier agency does not have the staff to monitor closely the 700,000 businesses and almost eight million trucks.” Nor, under the current administration, the inclination. The right call this “smart enforcement.”

About 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries occur a year as a result of truck-related accidents. Although the number of deaths and injuries per mile traveled has continued to fall slowly over the course of the Bush administration, the rate of decline is far below the targets the agency itself set and which are widely believed to be attainable. Smart, aren’t they?