When I think about what makes the Center for Progressive Reform the “Center for Progressive Reform,” one name comes to mind: Rena Steinzor. This year, Rena is officially retiring from her “day job” as Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, so it is a fitting occasion to reflect on what her “side hustle” at the Center meant for the organization and for me personally.
Rena was the president at the Center when I first joined the organization more than 16 years ago. She was also an active member scholar, leading our work on issues as diverse as worker health and safety, cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, and reforming the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The Center was still relatively new at the time and definitely had a “garage band” feel about it. None of us really had much experience running a nonprofit organization — we were mostly academics and early-career attorneys. That we survived and thrived during those years, against the odds, owed in no small part to Rena’s intuitions about how a small think tank working on esoteric issues could nonetheless have a big impact.
One of her key intuitions was how to short-circuit industry’s campaign to surreptitiously sabotage the regulatory system. The point of their move, of course, was to make it possible for industry to defeat broadly popular safeguards by covering their tracks in the minutiae of the rulemaking process. “We’re not rolling back regulations, we’re maximizing net benefits” epitomizes this strategy.
Rena’s response was to call BS — that is, to articulate with refreshing bluntness the practical consequences of their “regulatory reforms.” This no doubt came as a surprise to industry. They were betting that the legacy think tanks on the left would take the bait and fight technocratic wonkery with still more technocratic wonkery, further removing the debate from the public. Not Rena, though. They were probably also counting on legacy think tanks falling back on academic politeness. Rena, however, recognized that, for think tanks such as the Center, our expertise wouldn’t count for much if it couldn’t be translated into righteous outrage when called for.
Whether it was teenage farmworkers dying from asphyxiation after becoming trapped in grain silos because their bosses recklessly ordered them to “walk down the grain,” mice-infested compounding pharmacies cranking out contaminated medication that sickened hundreds and killed dozens more, or a dangerous and poorly managed deep sea oil well spewing out 210 million gallons of oil over the course of nearly five months and inflicting untold damage on large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico — yes, righteous outrage was often called for.
Her other key lesson for me and others who worked with her over the years is that whatever we wrote had to include concrete solutions for fixing the problems we were identifying. It didn’t matter if they were politically feasible in the near term. In fact, the bolder, the better. After all, if think tanks such as the Center weren’t going shift the Overton window and expand the politics of what was possible, then who would?
It’s been gratifying in recent years to see her sage advice pay off. Take the 2011 report on reducing corporate influence at OIRA that Rena and I both contributed to. It included 10 recommendations for reforming OIRA, which I’m sure were met with eyerolls at the time. Of those, four have been implemented in whole or in part through the Biden administration’s suite of Modernizing Regulatory Review reforms.
Fearless and solutions-focused. Those two values have become firmly entrenched into the Center’s ethos and identity, and they certainly shape how I approach my work every day. And to the extent I have succeeded in my role here at the Center, much of the credit goes to Rena.
Her scholarship and her role as a teacher and mentor to thousands of students are deserving of their own plaudits. But, here, I wanted to take a moment to recognize the indelible imprint she has left on the Center for Progressive Reform. Thank you, Rena, for everything.
