In case anyone thought the White House would seek additional appropriations to hire new agency staffers to do the regulatory look back work, it sure sounds like a no. Here's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein speaking on Federal News Radio:

"Agencies are in the best position to make choices about which rules to review and justify whether they need to be modified" he said. "The Executive Order makes clear that the look back process will occur with full understanding of the agency's priority settings and resource constraints in a tough budgetary environment. So we expect the agencies will take this process very seriously but do so in way that recognizes resources are not unlimited."

Sunstein said agencies will have to find a way to do the look back based on the resources they have already.

"I don't anticipate any additional …

Sixteen months ago, President Obama stood in the well of Congress and issued a ringing call for a progressive vision of government. Working to persuade Members of Congress to adopt health care reform, he said that “large-heartedness…is part of the American character.  Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand.” Many took comfort from that vision, the first avowedly affirmative one we had heard from a President about the government he leads in many a year. 

Since then, much of the President’s domestic agenda has been adopted, and a mid-term election “shellacking” has intervened. And now, President Obama, with the 2012 election drawing ever nearer, is embracing a far less generous vision. In an op-ed on the opinion pages …

President Obama’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning touted EPA’s “deregulation” of the artificial sweetener saccharin as a positive development for America. Inadvertently, the president made EPA look silly for having regulated the stuff in the first place. The use of this example was also unfortunate because EPA’s decision to deregulate had little consequence. Here’s the back story.

Beginning in the 1970s, scientists discovered that if you feed large quantities of saccharin to rats, they develop cancer. As a result, products containing saccharin were required to carry a warning label, and saccharin went on the lists of “hazardous substances” potentially subject to the Superfund toxic waste cleanup and hazardous waste regulations, as did all carcinogens. This result seemed counter-intuitive and industry lobbyists working against Superfund’s renewal in 1984-87 ridiculed EPA with the question: “If I spill a truckload of Tab …

Republican legislators have been scheming for years about ways that they can slow down, if not stop, needed health, safety and environmental regulations. But their latest effort, though creative, is perhaps their most ill-conceived. They’re calling it   “The REINS Act” (in the last Congress, H.R. 3765 sponsored by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), S. 3826 sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)), and, if adopted,  no new "economically significant" regulations would take effect unless affirmatively approved by Congress, by means of a joint congressional resolution of approval, signed by the President.  The proposal is a genuinely radical departure, plainly designed to gum up the regulatory works. Republicans have promised to hold congressional hearings on the bill early this year.

The REINS Act would make Congress the final arbiter of all significant regulatory decisions. While superficially this may seem like a good idea – after all, Members of Congress …

Representative Darrell Issa, the incoming chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has made his views on regulations fairly clear. Earlier this week, for example, he scored headlines when his office gave out a document publicizing the issues his committee will take up. From the document: "The committee will examine how overregulation has hurt job creation..."

No surprise; that's about the line we'd expect from Issa.

But someone in Issa's office must have recognized a problem: Won't the investigations not quite have the same credibility or punch if the investigator himself has already announced his conclusion?

Perhaps that’s why Rep. Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, took a different tack this same week, telling Politico: "Is there a pattern emerging? Is there a consistent practice or regulation that hurts jobs? Until you have all the facts, you really can't make …

One of the top agenda items for the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will be pressing an anti-regulatory bill they're calling the REINS Act. The bill would subject newly minted regulations protecting health, safety, the environment and more to a requirement that  Congress adopt resolutions of approval within 90 days of the date that the regulatory agency finishes its work.  It's a miserable idea for a number of reasons, many of which CPR Member Scholar David Driesen details in an op-ed in this morning's Syracuse Post-Standard.  He writes:

Since gridlock, backed by filibusters, makes passage of legislation extremely difficult today, this approach promises to make setting significant standards to address looming problems, from climate disruption to a new potential economic crisis, very unlikely. Just to make sure that routine delays in Congress can derail even popular and obviously needed standards, the …

A particularly revealing story in The Washington Post this weekend reported on a sordid tale of regulatory failure that may have helped contribute to this spring and summer’s outbreak of outbreak of egg-borne salmonella that sickened more than 1,900 people and led to the largest recall of eggs in U.S. history. In an agonizing case of closing the chicken coop door after the tainted eggs had escaped, FDA finally adopted a long-delayed regulation in July – two months after the outbreak – that might have helped prevent it. And this month Congress may give FDA new authority to regulate the safety of food in light of the salmonella case and other highly publicized outbreaks of food poisoning in the last few years.

Yet, under a proposal floated in an op-ed by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) in the same newspaper two days later, regulators would be forced …

"In order for CBA cost benefit analysis to be workable, regulators need to have a relatively restricted range of possibilities." That's what OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein wrote in a 2007 book. So how about from $82 billion to negative $251 billion, a third of a trillion dollars – is that a relatively restricted range?

Those are the estimated net benefit figures, over 50 years, in the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) for EPA's "strong" coal ash regulation proposal. Do those numbers actually mean much? No. Yet there they are, trumpeted as if they have meaning. They don't.

As regular readers know, the regulation of coal ash has been quite the journey. We take the next step in the trek today, when the public comment period ends on EPA's current proposals. CPR President Rena Steinzor submitted comments on the coal ash rulemaking this morning (press release …

Senator Mary Landrieu released her hold on the nomination of Jacob Lew for Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Senate confirmed Lew by voice vote Thursday evening.

Back when Lew had his confirmation hearings, CPR President Rena Steinzor wrote here about the challenges Lew will face on the regulatory front ("OMB Nominee Jacob Lew, Meet Broken Regulatory State").