As the clock ticked closer to the end of the work day a few Fridays back, the Trump administration quietly made an announcement certain to put smiles on the faces of many corporate interest lobbyists in and around the DC Beltway: Neomi Rao, a little known but very conservative law professor at George Mason University's Scalia Law School, would be the nominee for Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The announcement probably went unnoticed by most of the working class families and low-income communities that Trump calls his base, but it may just have a huge impact on their health and well-being. 

As the next "regulatory czar," as the position is popularly known, Professor Rao is set to play a key role in the Trump administration's efforts to roll back the kind of public safeguards that we count on …

Steve Bannon's crusade to deconstruct the administrative state took two big steps forward last week, concluding with Donald Trump nominating George Mason University Law School professor Neomi Rao as his "regulatory czar." CPR will publish a new report on the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator during the Trump administration in the days to come, but for now, I want to focus on the first big development: Acting Administrator Dominic Mancini's new memo providing agencies with guidance on how to comply with Trump's Executive Order 13771. 

The unenviable task Mancini and his team faced was trying to rehabilitate the almost cartoonishly absurd executive order by transforming its amateur-hour delusions about how the regulatory system works into a serious policy program. Specifically, the memo addresses several key issues related to Section 2 of the order, which requires agencies (1) to …

This June marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the great sea battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific. The American victory over the Japanese at Midway, a tiny atoll literally midway between California and Japan, ended the period of expansion of Japanese-held territory in the Pacific. And so began the long, bloody march that led to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and that eventually led American bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Last week, we all witnessed another turning point that 75 years from now could well be understood to have had similar importance. President Trump’s executive order abandoning the Clean Power Plan and practically every other federal regulatory initiative to address climate change marks a grim turning point in the global effort to combat the most serious environmental challenge in the history of human life on the planet.

So …

CPR Member Scholars published another bumper crop of op-eds this past month. We maintain a running list on our op-eds page, but to save CPRBlog readers a click or two, here's a quick rundown:

On March 3, David Driesen had a piece in The Hill – that's a Washington, D.C., outlet aimed at the policy community – headlined, "Ruling by Decree." Driesen takes the president to task for issuing a series of executive orders aimed at undercutting duly enacted laws. "No president," he writes, "has devoted the first month of his presidency to promulgating a collection of executive orders that so blatantly ignores our constitutional system's fundamental tenets."

On March 9, Tom McGarity published a piece in the Corpus Christi Caller Times, headlined, "EPA Just Adopted a See-No-Evil Policy." McGarity focuses on a little-covered gift from EPA chief Scott Pruitt to the oil and gas …

The Trump administration’s fundamental hostility to government is by now plainly apparent. The President issued an executive order requiring agencies to get rid of two regulations for each new one that is adopted. He appointed administrators who have been extraordinarily hostile to the missions of the departments and agencies that they now head, such as Scott Pruitt at EPA and Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education. And he has proposed deep budget cuts for regulatory agencies. Instead of the touted “reforms,” the administration is committed to a regulatory agenda that affirmatively and aggressively seeks to frustrate the normal operations of government as part of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Throughout U.S. history, government regulation has generated a wide variety of public benefits including safer workplaces and food, cleaner air and water, traffic safety, and greater protection for civil and political rights. These regulations …

Unless you regularly read newspapers from markets ranging from Baltimore to Houston to the San Francisco Bay area, chances are that you missed some of the op-eds that CPR’s scholars and staff published in the nation’s newspapers in February. We post links on our website, of course; you can find them on the various issue pages, as well as on our op-eds page. But we thought CPRBlog readers might appreciate a quick rundown from last month, so here goes:

• In a February 2 piece in the Houston Chronicle, CPR’s Tom McGarity warned about the dangers of the Regulatory Accountability Act, which had recently zipped through the House of Representatives. He wrote, “The proponents of the bill insist that it will improve federal regulation, but the real purpose and effect of the bill is to stall the overall process­ making it harder for federal agencies …

The first rule of reading anti-regulatory bills, executive orders, and other policy prescriptions is: Sweat the hyper-technical, anodyne-sounding stuff. And President Donald Trump's February 24 executive order on "Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda" demonstrates why this rule exists. 

One of the order's provisions – which no doubt caused glaze to form over many an eye – read: "Each Regulatory Reform Task Force shall attempt to identify regulations that . . . are inconsistent with the requirements of section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act, 2001 (44 U.S.C. 3516 note)." I know my eyes glazed over the first time I read it. But it's worth a careful look at what that obscure legal citation refers to and what its inclusion could mean for existing regulatory safeguards. 

First things first, though. Trump's February 24 order – in a depressingly hilarious twist of irony – sets out to …

The so-called Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS Act) has already passed the House this year, as it did in previous sessions. The current version, which amends the Congressional Review Act (CRA), differs somewhat from previous versions but still suffers from a fatal flaw – it is unconstitutional. 

The current REINS Act has three parts. One part essentially reflects the recent Executive Order on Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs, except that the REINS Act only requires repeal of one regulation for each regulation adopted, rather than the E.O.'s two-for-one requirement. Another part of the REINS Act continues the CRA, but only for non-major rules. The final part, the part that is unconstitutional, provides that no "major rule" – defined as a "significant regulatory action" requiring a cost/benefit analysis under Executive Order 12866 – shall take effect until Congress "approves" it by joint …

Remember how Donald Trump bragged he was going to run the country like a business?

Imagine if before Trump could open a new casino, he was bound by a rule to close two existing casinos, and the costs of the new casino couldn't exceed the cost savings from no longer operating the old ones. Would this make sense as a business strategy? Of course not.

Unless, of course, you were secretly trying to sabotage the business and run it into the ground (and maybe drown it in a bathtub).

Funny then, that Trump would impose that rule on the agencies now working for him. But that's just what he's done. Under Trump's latest executive order (signed Monday, January 30), before a federal agency can issue a new regulation, the agency first has to rescind two pre-existing regulations. And the cost savings from scrapping …