The Bush administration recently announced its decision to roll back clean air protections for older, coal-fired power plants, allowing them to modernize without installing the latest technology to cut down on emissions, as reported in the Washington Post. Sen. James Jeffords (I-VT), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee reacted angrily to the announcement, indicating he would use subpoena power to find out how the Bush administration reached its decision, and whether it was unduly influenced by big polluting power plants. In response, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they plan to turn over documents after their proposal is reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, though Jeffords is still pressing forward. "This appears to be the biggest rollback of the Clean Air Act in history," Jeffords said in a prepared statement. "It is clear by [this] action that this Administration is intent on undoing more than 25 years of progress on clean air. The question is why?" The decision, expected for some time, formally alters enforcement efforts initiated by the Clinton administration, which brought dozens of lawsuits after it uncovered hundreds of cases where aging power plants failed to install pollution control equipment during major modifications, a direct violation of the New Source Review (NSR) provision of the Clean Air Act. Instead, the Bush administration will relax standards for upgrades, as described by the Natural Resources Defense Council, while curtailing new lawsuits. In particular, the administration intends to expand the definition of "routine maintenance," which is exempt from New Source Review, allowing utilities to make more extensive upgrades without having to install new anti-pollution equipment. In devising this new rule, which EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman estimates could take three years, EPA will ask for comments on a range of cost thresholds from 1.5 percent to 15 percent of the unit's value being repaired. This proposed expansion of "routine maintenance" will reportedly be challenged in court as inconsistent with the Clean Air Act by environmental and health organizations, as well as states that suffer from the transport of pollution from other states. Meanwhile, the administration says it will continue ongoing litigation initiated under President Clinton, but the shift in policy, and the administration's cozy relationship with industry, undoubtedly makes it much less likely those cases will be resolved on favorable terms. Less than a week after the administration's announcement, the General Accounting Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- released a report finding that electric power plants that began operating before 1972 emitted 59 percent of the sulfur dioxide and 47 percent of the nitrogen oxides (which are regulated under the Clean Air Act) from fossil fuel units in 2000, even though they generate only 42 percent of all electricity by such units. This has serious health implications for many Americans; such pollution causes an estimated 30,000 premature deaths per year. A ">recent study (March 5, 2002) by the Journal of the American Medical Association linked long-term exposure to fine particles of air pollution from coal-fired power plants to lung cancer, concluding that people living in the most heavily polluted metropolitan areas have a 12 percent increased risk of dying of lung cancer than people in the least polluted areas. In writing the Clean Air Act, Congress exempted older plants from compliance with new emissions standards because it was generally thought they would be phased out -- an assumption that turned out to be wrong. Yet instead of pushing these plants to clean up their act, the Bush administration seems intent on giving them a permanent free pass.