Who Is Running OIRA?
Reposted from RegBlog.
In his revealing new book about his nearly four years as President Barack Obama’s “regulatory czar,” Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein describes a striking moment: “After I had been in the job for a few years, a Cabinet member showed up at my office and told my chief of staff, ‘I work for Cass Sunstein.’ Of course that wasn’t true – but still.”
But still, indeed. Sunstein’s book, Simpler: The Future of Government, makes clear just how much power the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) wields in this administration. As I have written elsewhere, Sunstein informs us that, as OIRA Administrator, he had the power to “say no to members of the president’s Cabinet;” to deposit “highly touted rules, beloved by regulators, onto the shit list;” to make sure that some rules “never saw the light of day;” to impose cost-benefit analysis “wherever the law allowed” and to transform cost-benefit analysis from an analytical tool into a “rule of decision,” meaning that “agencies could not go forward" if their rules flunked OIRA's cost-benefit test.
As Sunstein’s statements attest, the person who leads OIRA is, in the …
See the UPDATE at the bottom of the page.
Last Thursday, President Obama named Howard Shelanski as his new nominee for Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). As of that evening, Shelanski was listed on the website of the industry-funded, fiercely anti-regulatory Mercatus Center as an "expert" in its Technology Policy Program. OIRA has long operated as a regulatory chokepoint, stalling and weakening health and environmental safeguards at the behest of industry groups, and as I've written, the protection of the public will require the next Administrator to work hard to transform OIRA's role. Although much research remains to be done on Shelanski's record, his association with Mercatus raised serious concerns about whether he could be the person to bring that fundamental change to OIRA. (In fact, it brought back memories of George W. Bush, who culled his second OIRA …
A few months ago, I urged the Obama Administration to view the nomination of a second-term Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) as an opportunity to fundamentally change the role that the office plays in the regulatory system. Dozens of important rules got stuck at OIRA in the year before the presidential elections and are still languishing. House Republicans continue their blistering and unsubstantiated attacks on the agencies, doing everything they can to cut their budgets beyond the bone, while the Obama Administration does nothing to rebut these tirades. And most agencies at the federal, state, and local levels are on life support, unable to prevent, much less mitigate a series of deadly fiascos. As just two very recent examples: consider the explosion at a West Texas fertilizer factory that claimed 15 lives several days ago, catching emergency response crews at their most …
This morning, CPR President Rena Steinzor will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the proposed Energy Consumers Relief Act of 2013 (ECRA), yet another in a series of bills from House Republicans aimed at blocking federal regulatory agencies from fully implementing the nation's health and safety laws — in this case such landmark legislation as the Clean Air Act, and any other law enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency that is in any sense "energy-related."
Here's the nut paragraph of the bill:
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency may not promulgate as final an energy-related rule that is estimated to cost more than $1 billion if the Secretary of Energy determines under Section 3(3) of ECRA that, with respect to the rule, significant adverse effects to the economy will be caused.
In other words, the …
Over at Climate Progress, CPR Member Scholar Lisa Heinzerling critiques Cass Sunstein's new book, “Simpler: The Future of Government."
Rules on worker health, environmental protection, food safety, health care, consumer protection, and more all passed through Sunstein’s inbox. Some never left.
...
In Sunstein’s account, OIRA’s interventions also ensured “a well-functioning system of public comment” and “compliance with procedural ideals that might not always be strictly compulsory but that might be loosely organized under the rubric of ‘good government’.” No theme more pervades Sunstein’s book than the idea that government transparency is essential to good regulatory outcomes and to good government itself. The deep and sad irony is that few government processes are as opaque as the process of OIRA review, superintended for almost four years by Sunstein himself.
The full piece is here.
From Member Scholar Lisa Heinzerling's new article in the Yale Journal on Regulation:
With President Obama's nomination of Gina McCarthy as the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), much attention has turned to her record as the EPA official in charge of air pollution programs, experience as the head of two states’ environmental agencies, and views on specific policies and priorities. And with the President’s nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), attention has likewise turned to her record and experience. Few recognize, however, the tight relationship between the two nominations: the Obama administration’s approach to governing will make Ms. Burwell Ms. McCarthy’s boss. ...
But it turns out the OMB itself seems not to want to accept accountability for running U.S. environmental policy. In a new law review article …
Rep. Tammy Duckworth appears to have been caught up in the anti-regulatory fervor that has continued to afflict the House of Representatives ever since the GOP took control there in 2010. On Monday, Representative Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, announced a plan to address what she said was a problem: “For businesses with less than twenty employees, the annual cost of federal regulation can be over $10,000 per worker.” But before we get to the proposed solution, there’s a problem with the stated problem: it’s just not true. The stat comes from the 2010 “Crain and Crain” study commissioned by the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Advocacy, a study that has been thoroughly debunked in a CPR white paper, by the Congressional Research Service, EPI, and others. Fully 70 percent of the study’s cost estimates came from a regression analysis based on …
In late 2011, a little known but surprisingly influential independent federal agency called the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) conducted a research project on “International Regulatory Cooperation” (IRC), culminating in a set of recommendations to U.S. agencies. In a letter sent yesterday (March 21), CPR Member Scholars Rena Steinzor and Thomas McGarity, and I urge ACUS Chairman Paul Verkuil to look back over the project’s many flaws, which reflect—in both process and substance—ACUS’s pervasive bias toward the views of regulated industries.
What exactly is meant by “international regulatory cooperation”? As we write:
The principal objective of IRC is to “harmonize” U.S. regulatory standards with those of other countries or international standard-setting organizations. …. There is always a danger that such harmonization efforts will become a deregulatory “race to the bottom” in which nations, at the urging of business groups, converge …
This morning, CPR President Rena Steinzor testifies before the House Committee on Small Business's Subcommittee on Investigations, Oversight and Regulations. From the witness list, it would appear that this'll be another in a series of hearings structured by House Republicans to inveigh against the regulations that protect Americans from a variety of hazards in the air we breathe, water we drink, places we work, products we buy, food we eat, and more.
If history is any guide, most of the testimony and discussion will focus not on how best to protect Americans from such problems, but on the costs to small business of doing so. Steinzor is the lone witness permitted to the minority party -- the Democrats, that is -- and as such, could well be the only person who mentions the benefits of regulation. Study after study has demonstrated that the economic benefits of regulation vastly exceed …
Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the case of Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture – a complicated and relatively little-noticed case that could have important implications for the direction of “takings” doctrine and, in turn, for how far judges wielding this doctrine may intrude upon the policy-making functions of the elected branches. To understand the case, it is useful to analogize the issues in the case to a set of Russian nested dolls.
The issue representing the innermost doll, which the Court will only get to if it can unpack the outer dolls, is the most intriguing and arguably the most significant in terms of the future of takings doctrine. The question is whether a federal agricultural marketing program results in a “taking” of private property within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment by requiring raisin producers to …
