There’s nothing Washington loves better than a false dichotomy. Tax or cut. Spend or slash. Regulate or deregulate. Either you’re for the former or you’re for the latter. Well, that isn’t how life really works, and -- especially when it comes to regulation -- it certainly isn’t how manufacturers think. Everyone wants clean water and clean air, everyone wants an economy that delivers growth and opportunity, and neither idea is in conflict with the other. The challenge is how do we achieve both?

The answer is not to regulate too much or regulate too little, but simply regulate smarter. This is the common-sense idea underpinning a recent policy announcement from the Environmental Protection Agency -- something that manufacturers strongly support and, if fully enacted, something that could have the greatest positive impact on the future of American manufacturing than any other EPA action in recent memory.

Recently, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler (pictured) ordered his agency to develop reforms that would increase consistency and transparency in the consideration of costs and benefits in the EPA rule-making process. This may sound arcane, but it actually matters a lot. There is hardly any trust or balance in the current cost-benefit equation. Nor is there much transparency in the assembly process for rules and regulations that it relies on. For example, when the EPA measured the benefits of its carbon-reducing rules, it used a metric that counted benefits 300 years into the future. Of the 17 rules the EPA issued between 2000 and 2013 that cost $1 billion or more, more than 97% of the benefits claimed were from reductions of a single pollutant (particulate matter), which almost necessarily meant the EPA double-counted benefits from rule to rule.

On the cost side, the EPA regularly avoids a statutory requirement to examine the impact of its regulations on small businesses, even though small firms make up the supply chain of virtually every regulated industry. It has also displayed frustrating inconsistency from rule to rule in terms of the costs it measures. For instance, the agency’s 2010 fuel economy rule measured only the costs and benefits to cars, despite the fact that the rule simultaneously triggered New Source Review permitting requirements for millions of buildings by making greenhouse gases “regulated pollutants.”

In perhaps the most egregious example, the EPA once considered setting a standard for ozone so strict that the controls needed to meet it didn’t exist. In its cost-benefit analysis, the EPA simply called these “unknown controls” and assigned them a modest cost. We measured the true cost of these standards and arrived at a different conclusion: It would have been the most expensive regulation ever.

No one wins when an agency this important is forced to rely on a system this flawed. Overcounting benefits threatens environmental action by eroding trust in what the agency says and puts out. Undercounting costs threatens manufacturers, our economy and the livelihoods of countless middle-class workers and families who obviously bear the brunt when reality eventually sets in (as it inevitability must). No one should want either of these things, and no one should have anything to fear from a serious, reliable and consistent set of standards for measuring costs and benefits into the future. Having reliable data to go on and smarter regulations based off of that data will go a long way toward getting us all closer to the better future that -- in the end -- every American wants. Greener and cleaner. Stronger and more prosperous.

The EPA has done a good job over the years cleaning up the environment, and regulations are a big part of its success. What manufacturers need now is for the agency to get those regulations right the first time. We don’t want zero regulation. We don’t want massive regulation. We just want better regulation. The way to get there is through a smarter and more consistent evaluation of the costs and benefits that they rely on, just as the EPA administrator himself recently proposed. Now, it’s up to the administrator and his team to issue rules fixing this process for good.