House Republicans have gone to great lengths to block implementation of a new food safety law, while also trying to cut the budgets of agencies that oversee food safety. But new data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows just how foolhardy those moves are, as rates of foodborne illnesses are rising:

The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the rates of infections linked to four out of five key pathogens it tracks – salmonella, vibrio, campylobacter and listeria – remained relatively steady or increased from 2007 through 2011. The exception is a strain of E. coli, which has been tied to fewer illnesses over the same time period.

Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million and kill roughly 3,000 Americans each year, and recently, a salmonella outbreak forced the recall of 30,000 pounds of Cargill-produced ground beef. Despite these numbers, the GOP budget made drastic cuts to the Food and Drug Administration in an attempt to prevent the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, a law signed by President Obama last year that marked the first significant update to food safety law in a generation. The House farm bill, meanwhile, contains an amendment proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) that would prevent states from regulating agricultural products.

Republicans, however, aren’t necessarily alone in their fight. Obama also sought cuts to the Food Safety Inspection Service in his budget plan, and his administration has thus far failed to meet required deadlines to implement new regulations. “Everyone was hoping that this new food safety law would be in place and we’d start seeing improvements by now,” Erik Olson, a director at the Pew Health Group, told the Washington Post. “What these CDC numbers show is that unless new protections are put into place, millions of Americans are going to continue to get sick from contaminated food.”

Mike Leavitt, the man Mitt Romney has tapped to head his transition should he win this November, has held a wide array of public-sector jobs including Governor of Utah and Secretary of Health and Human Services. But perhaps most interesting is the fifteen months he spent from November 6, 2003 through January 26, 2005 as President George W. Bush’s EPA administrator — a period over which he supported many of the environmental protection efforts Romney has railed against through the campaign.

Romney’s official campaign website has a prominent section on government regulations entitled “Obama’s Failure,” which blasts the EPA for “endless new regulations touching on countless other forms of economic activity—regulations that drive up costs, hinder investment, and destroy jobs. Romney has added that “there are other people who would like to put in place a cap-and-trade program and dramatically increase the cost of energy. That’s their view. And by the way, that would kill a lot of jobs.”

Leavitt has a rather opposite record. In his introductory address to his EPA employees, enthusiastically endorsed a cap-and-trade, telling them:

We need to take the giant step toward national market-based solutions; to do that we need only look to our own experience. That is exactly what we’re doing with cap and trade. The cap and trade strategy was key to the breakthrough against acid rain. It is central to Clear Skies. The cap and trade approach shows us again and again that people do more and they do it faster when they have an incentive to do what’s in the public’s interest.

And, a ThinkProgress analysis of Regulations.gov data reveals that between Leavitt’s first day as administrator to his last, the agency promulgated or amended 232 regulatory rules. These
included tougher standards for ozone, diesel fuels, and other air pollutants. Among these were things like National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter, National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Asbestos, and Protection of Stratospheric Ozone; Refrigerant Recycling; Substitute Refrigerants — the sorts of regulations Romney says “drive up costs, hinder investment, and destroy jobs.”

Given their opposite views on these issues and Leavitt’s strong support of ObamaCare, he seems a surprising choice to lead Romney’s transition.

The United States established one of its first true consumer protection laws in 1872, when it protected consumers from fraud involving the use of U.S. mail. But the modern era of consumer protection didn’t begin for another 90 years, when President John F. Kennedy delivered remarks to Congress that established four basic consumer rights — rights to safety, to choice, to be informed, and to be heard — and laid the groundwork for the consumer protections Americans expect and depend upon today.

Kennedy’s remarks, delivered 50 years ago today, argued that protecting consumers was vital to the stability of the American economy and the country’s national interest:

If consumers are offered inferior products, if prices are exorbitant, if drugs are unsafe or worthless, if the consumer is unable to choose on an informed basis, then his dollar is wasted, his health and safety may be threatened, and the national interest suffers.

Kennedy’s four basic consumer rights led to the establishment of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and to the passing of anti-trust, patent, and price gouging laws, as well as the creation of non-governmental actors like the Better Business Bureau to protect consumer rights.

While Americans take many of these protections for granted, they are often under assault from business interests and lawmakers. Regulatory agencies from the Food and Drug Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission have been subjected to drastic budget cuts, as well as repeated efforts to prevent them from passing new regulations or enforcing those that already exist.

Those same efforts are now focused on the newest consumer protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Obama appointed the CFPB’s first director in January, after more than a year of Republican promises that they would block his nominee. Despite those efforts, the CFPB is already helping consumers in numerous ways, primarily by taking steps to prevent and remedy the predatory, discriminatory, and potentially illegal financial practices that were prevalent during the housing crisis.

“The federal Government — by nature the highest spokesman for all the people — has a special obligation to be alert to the consumer’s needs and to advance the consumer’s interests,” Kennedy said. “Their voice is not always as loudly heard in Washington as the voices of smaller and better-organized groups–nor is their point of view always defined and presented. But under our economic as well as our political form of democracy, we share an obligation to protect the common interest in every decision we make.”

So-called “job killing regulations” have become a favorite target of Republicans since the economic downturn, as legislators have denounced the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and virtually every other government agency that writes rules. The EPA has emerged as target number one, with Republican presidential candidates promising to shut it down for good and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives seeking to defund it at every turn.

According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, however, the “job-killing” part of the phrase “job-killing regulation” is built largely on myth. Last year, EPI released a report that found that several of the EPA’s proposed environmental regulations would actually create jobs. Now that the EPA has finalized a rule regulating toxic waste, EPI has used that rule to analyze whether such regulations are, indeed, job-killers. Once again, it found the opposite to be true, and said the new rule will actually create more jobs than it previously estimated:

Previous studies (such as Bivens 2011) that have estimated the jobs impact of specific proposed regulatory changes have probably understated the gains to employment spurred by the rule, likely by roughly 50%. But even given these understatements, the effects of some specific regulatory changes—such as the toxics rule, the largest single air-quality rule currently being proposed by the EPA—are surely positive for job creation. [...]

Even with multiplier effects, these estimates translate into job gains of roughly 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015, depending on whether one or both offsets to the job-depressing effects of price increases are used. … But what this reassessment does make clear is that it is near-inconceivable that adoption of the rule will cost any jobs at all in the near term. The effect will be unambiguously positive.

The study is hardly the first indication that the GOP’s “job-killing regulations” rhetoric is built on a myth. The EPA’s regulation of the coal industry helped boost industry employment to a 15-year high, and EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up Chesapeake Bay would create 35 times more jobs than the GOP’s favorite pet project, the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP’s spiel has even fallen flat with business leaders large and small, with one CEO saying there was “no question” the new regulations would create jobs.