I just finished watching a video by Texas Paul, a MeidasTouch Network contributor, which covered one of the root causes of the train wreck. Below are the notes I took while watching this video:
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Summary of the Texas Paul video covering the railroad accident in East Palestine, Ohio:
Rodney Davis (R- IL): sponsored a bipartisan bill (The FAST Act (2015)) to help facilitate how money for federally funded transportation programs can be used more effectively and efficiently. It passed and was signed into law by President Obama. One of the problems with the FAST Act was it contained a provision (a poison pill) which circumvented the legislative process to repeal legislation.
The “poison pill” provision said that if any regulation under the purview of the FAST Act was determined not to be viable due to a "Cost-Benefit Analysis" determining the costs of the regulation were more than the benefits assigned, the regulation could be automatically repealed without going through the process for the legislature to repeal it. At first glance this provision seems reasonable. However, the results of a "Cost-Benefit Analysis" (CBA) can be warped based on the information used for the analysis (Garbage-In/Garbage-out).
The “poison pill” provision was used by Railroad Industry lobbyists to convince the Trump Administration that the CBA for required emergency braking systems on railway cars which carry hazardous materials demonstrated that the cost of the regulation in the FAST Act exceeded the benefits. As a result, the Trump Administration decided to repeal the regulation without going to congress based on the "poison pill" provision in the legislation. The train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio was partially due to railroad cars carrying hazardous materials not stopping quickly enough to avoid crashing into the car in-front of them.
Pete Buttigieg (current US Federal Government Department of Transportation Secretary) can do nothing to put the regulation back in place. The “poison pill” provision in the FAST Act legislation only provides for removing regulations in the FAST Act, not creating new ones. As such, new legislation is required to put this provision back in place. Congress needs to pass new legislation which will reinstate the regulation called for in the original "FAST Act" legislation relative to requiring emergency braking systems on railroad train cars which transport hazardous materials and extend the list of hazardous materials to include all of the hazardous materials transported via US railroads.
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