Don’t make a bigger mess

Philadelphia Inquirer: With all the gritty challenges bequeathed to President-elect Barack Obama — a two-front war, an economic crisis, and the continuing threat of terrorism — the Bush administration shouldn’t be adding to the list.

The new administration already is sizing up dozens and dozens of misguided Bush initiatives that the new president hopes to reverse through executive orders. In two important areas, for example, Obama needs to ease Bush policies that imposed obstacles to embryonic stem-cell research and also opened the door to drilling for oil and natural gas across a huge swath of Western lands.

Making those course corrections could be only a small part of the mess that Obama will have to clean up, however, if President Bush moves ahead with a host of other last-minute regulatory changes said to be in the works.

Family-leave policies

Those rule changes could ease up on limiting emissions from power plants near national parks, expand uranium mining close to the Grand Canyon, and free mining companies in Appalachia to backfill more valleys with the dirt from mountaintop coal mining. Also teed up among 90 new regulations are changes in family-leave policies, oil-spill regulations, and higher catch limits for some commercial ocean fishing.

Whether these moves are best isn’t even the issue at this point. More important is that the next administration be given the chance to put its stamp of approval on major regulatory changes, particularly in light of suspect science used to justify other Bush administration policies over the past eight years.

It was no more right for the outgoing Clinton administration to force-feed such regulatory changes on Bush than it is for the current occupant of the White House to do so.

But the stakes are even higher now — in a more dangerous world where the smooth transition of these administrations could be a matter of national security.