I’m a Consumer Advocate. The Rulemaking Process Is Rigged in Favor of Corporations, Not People
February 24, 2026
By Alan Smith
We’re in the process of losing a generation of consumer, worker, and public health protections, and the human suffering that results from these broad rollbacks will be incalculable. You’ve seen the headlines: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is abdicating its responsibility to regulate pollutants that cause climate change. The National Institutes of Health wants to stop funding scientific research. The Department of Health and Human Services is led by anti-vax conspiracy theorists. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been gutted and has reversed consumer protection rules it once championed. The list goes on and on.
While much of that chaos rests squarely on the Trump administration’s rush to dismantle administrative capacity and privatize everything, rulemaking and regulatory processes were failing consumers even before Trump’s second term began. A half-century of corporate consolidation and weakening state capacity created a massive power imbalance between people power and corporate power. This disparity is reinforced by a state that passively collects inputs and has created baroque and complex systems exploitable by corporations but inaccessible to ordinary people. As policymakers seek to renew the government’s capacity to serve the public, they must guard against corporate capture of regulatory processes and give power back to the people to make rules that keep us all safe.
Bringing People into the Process: Grassroots Power in Consumer Advocacy
As an organizer with Consumer Reports, I’ve heard stories from people who faced harm when we still had government watchdogs on the beat. Now that we’re in the depths of our deregulation binge, I’m seeing a horrifying increase in those stories. People who get sick are not only struggling to pay their hospital bills, they’re also worrying that their debt might make it impossible to get a loan for a car or to keep a business afloat. They’re worried about what’s in their food, and if their kids might be harmed by furniture tipping over or by toys that burn their skin or clog their organs. They want their cars to be safe and to pollute less. But above all else, they’re frustrated with the slow pace of change—so frustrated that they’re giving up on the systems that are designed to protect us.
Since the very beginnings of the consumer protection movement in the US, there’s been an important link between advocates and the agencies that set the floor for different marketplaces. But from my perspective as an organizer, I’ve grown to see how the system does not meaningfully take into account people’s lived experiences. Instead, it relegates consumers to a headcount that is “turned out” but not meaningfully included in decision-making on rules and regulations. I’ve watched the way this erodes their belief in their ability to make change.
Government is the only institution with the scale and potential for democratic decision-making around society’s biggest challenges, from climate change to technological advancement. But the slow, unresponsive, and archaic version of the US regulatory system we had even before the Trump administration is simply no match for those challenges. The silver lining of the Trump administration’s destructiveness is the chance we now have to reimagine these institutions and rebuild regulatory agencies that are more consumer-centric and democratic.
To do so, we must dismiss the nonsensical argument that democracy is inherently too inefficient to meet the moment, and the incomplete narrative that excess bureaucracy—“waste, fraud, and abuse”—is what hinders effective governance. That dangerous oversimplification overlooks the immense political influence of monopolies and concentrated wealth across the economy (see, for example, incumbent internet service providers throttling efforts to deploy municipal broadband).
To meet this moment, we must build a functioning democracy that—far beyond the ballot box—values people’s participation in rulemaking more than that of profit-hungry corporations, and reflects back their engagement in a meaningful way.
To do so, we must dismiss the nonsensical argument that democracy is inherently too inefficient to meet the moment, and the incomplete narrative that excess bureaucracy—“waste, fraud, and abuse”—is what hinders effective governance.
Public Health vs. Corporate Power: The Case of PFAS in Drinking Water
Corporate influence and broken regulatory systems are a threat to public health, and the battle over “forever chemicals” in drinking water shows us why.
Widely available since the 1940s, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances and their derivatives, commonly known as PFAS, help make up products ranging from water-resistant cloth to the foam used in fire extinguishers. The more than 3,000 chemicals in this category are also colloquially known as forever chemicals, because once they get into the human body, they’re there forever and can cause a laundry list of health problems.
As these chemicals became nearly ubiquitous in our drinking water, a slow-motion health crisis unfolded across the country. Even though a growing body of scientific research in the 21st century found evidence of these health hazards, it took nearly a decade of consumer organizing to pass a single rule regulating six individual PFAS chemicals in drinking water.
This was in part thanks to a corporate playbook that’s been deployed to stave off reform for everything from cigarettes to climate change: delay (no, these are a new set of PFAS chemicals, the old ones are the ones that cause cancer!), obfuscate (the science isn’t settled! Maybe something else is causing these problems!), muck up the works (look at all the good things PFAS are used for!), and make as much money as possible in the interim.
The EPA’s inaction was also a result of a regulatory system that doesn’t meaningfully allow for democratic input. The rulemaking process relied heavily on expert testimony, but left little to no room for the people who had the hard-won expertise of being sickened by PFAS—incurring devastating health effects that further diminished their ability to get organized.
Most individual consumers that we at Consumer Reports worked with didn’t know what PFAS were and had no idea that the odorless, colorless chemicals were in their drinking water. They didn’t have time to sort through the differences between PFAS, microplastics, phthalates, and plasticizers, or heavy metals like lead, arsenic, or mercury—people simply wanted to know that their water was safe. The perceived level of expertise needed to effect the rulemaking process overwhelmed people; they didn’t know how to make a comment and certainly were not familiar with the Federal Registry. (What’s more, there is no democratic process through which a citizen can introduce a rule—one can only try to shape rules that an agency has introduced.)
Compare this to the other side: paid professionals whose jobs focus only on PFAS, armed with talking points and cherry-picked stats, needing no collective education or buy-in. Lobbyists who have already mastered the complex processes of where to put a comment, who have the congressional scheduler’s cell phone number in their contacts list, and who know exactly the language of the debate. As noted in a recent Roosevelt report by Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph, one former government official summed up how “a single phone call from a C-suite executive or DC insider can often gain immediate attention from a high-level political appointee, while ordinary people and small businesses lack the time, resources, know-how, or incentives to participate and be heard.”
Many people did go to listening sessions and did submit comments, and still felt as though their inputs disappeared into a system with no feedback loops. Many became defeatist, convinced that their advocacy would be meaningless and that any regulation would be too narrow to actually impact the larger problem: that their drinking water was harming them.
Eventually, we achieved a narrow definition of success—in 2023, the EPA proposed a rule to limit six of the thousands of PFAS compounds, and in April 2024, the rule passed. (Despite all that effort, the landmark decision is now in danger: The Trump EPA terminated over $15 million in funding for forever chemicals research and is now rolling back drinking water standards.)
This rule both took herculean efforts by many organizations and millions of people, and is fundamentally narrow in its scope. Thanks to corporate capture and arcane rulemaking processes hardly accessible by victims of a public health crisis, it didn’t leave me or other advocates feeling like the holistic health of our environment or our bodies was the priority of the government.
A Vision for a More Responsive Government
Despite this hamstrung regulatory system, the solution—laid clear by what we’re losing—isn’t to break the government. Federal regulatory agencies are both less democratic than they need to be and the only institutions with the scale and (potential for) speed and flexibility to tackle our most important problems.
If we treat people as a key part of the rulemaking process, invite them to participate in the rules being made, remove some of the most destructive levers for corporate obstruction, and hold co-governance as a North Star, an effective and democratically responsive agency starts to come into focus.
Democratizing rulemaking would yield better regulations, improve the perceived legitimacy of agencies and help rebuild public trust in institutions, and cultivate a garden of democracy by encouraging public involvement in solving public problems.
How, then, must we rebuild these agencies? The past decade has seen improvements in public engagement, including agencies hosting in-person listening meetings, building and deploying public engagement expertise among staff, targeting outreach to stakeholders who aren’t in the room, and using digital participation tools that facilitate easier access to deliberative spaces beyond simply submitting a comment into the void.
These experiments are instructive in developing a refreshed set of principles for a more effective, responsive regulatory system.
If we treat people as a key part of the rulemaking process, invite them to participate in the rules being made, remove some of the most destructive levers for corporate obstruction, and hold co-governance as a North Star, an effective and democratically responsive agency starts to come into focus.
Agencies should make regulatory processes more transparent and accessible to the public. This could involve fixing information asymmetry by actively reaching out to the people affected by an issue, bringing them to the table, and setting the dialogue around their harms; It could also involve building a wider definition of expertise that takes into account the experiences of those affected by consumer protections, and makes rulemakers accountable to more than just trained lobbyists.
Regulatory processes should be reformed to be nimbler and more responsive to public needs. Agencies should move from episodic oversight to “continuous compliance.” Congress could also authorize agencies to build and expand on past rules (without restarting the rulemaking process from scratch) to stay current with scientific research. For instance, if PFAS are deemed worthy of regulation, the EPA could ease the process of adding other harmful chemicals to that list as science confirms their danger, rather than engaging in bespoke regulation for each new harm identified.
Agencies must incorporate built-in democratic feedback loops. This could look like acting faster and more democratically up front, with fewer lawsuits and challenges in the back end. It could also require building resilient structures of ongoing co-governance that bring stakeholders in at the rule creation process and close the communication loop with participants to show them how their engagement matters. Examples of this include the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to hold hearings and collect human stories to advance rulemaking (during the Biden administration, the FTC banned noncompete clauses after listening to worker testimony about being trapped in abusive jobs), and the CFPB’s database of consumer complaints.
The rulemaking process must reject corporate influence. This means exploring creative ways to limit the ability of lobbying groups to continuously bog down any regulatory process they don’t like by filing lawsuits and challenges over proposed rules.
Former government officials who have toiled in the weeds of economic policy and rulemaking have echoed the need for a renewed regulatory apparatus. In their comprehensive Roosevelt report, Garden-Monheit and Joseph provide an extensive menu of recommendations as to how we can “fling open the doors and proactively engage with the public.” The call is clear: For the government to “deliver for working families, stand up to special interests on their behalf, and earn the public’s trust,” we must rebuild our federal agencies to prioritize consumers, not corporations. Doing so will require bold and comprehensive action to incorporate democratic participation in the process.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.”
Author
