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 Administrator, Susan Dudley, from Mercatus's ranks.)
I pointed the Mercatus connection out in a blog the morning after his nomination. By Friday afternoon, without any explanation, Shelanski's name had been quietly removed from Mercatus' list of experts. (Here's Google's cached version (in pdf form) from April 11, 2013 showing Shelanski's name; here's the same page still available on the web as of this morning; and here's the Shelanski-less version of the page as it looks today on the Mercatus website.)
So, questions arise: Did Mercatus take his name off its list of scholars at Shelanski's request, or on their own initiative? Was Mercatus somehow mistaken about who its own scholars were? The answers to those questions, if we ever get them, will give us a better idea whether Mercatus somehow over-reached when it listed him as one of their scholars, or—what's more concerning—whether there was some relationship that Shelanski, Mercatus, or both now would rather hide from view.
UPDATE: A few hours after this was posted, Benjamin Goad of The Hill put these questions to Mercatus spokesperson Leigh Harrington, who said that Shelanski's name was incorrectly added to the Mercatus website's list of Technology Experts. According to Goad's article, Harrington maintained that (quoting the article) "Shelanski should have been listed among the ranks of speakers who have participated in Mercatus programs, but was 'incorrectly categorized' as an expert. 'We fixed the error once it was pointed out to us,' Harrington said."
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Rena Steinzor | April 30, 2013
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. […]
Matthew Freeman | April 29, 2013
CPR’s Tom McGarity has an op-ed in this morning’s Christian Science Monitor describing the regulatory environment in which that West, Texas, fertilizer plant came to have a large stockpile of explosive material while operating with little or no oversight from state or federal authorities. An April 17 explosion at the plant claimed at least 15 […]
Rena Steinzor | April 26, 2013
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 […]
Daniel Farber | April 24, 2013
Reposted from Legal Planet, by permisison. There are a lot of things to disagree about in terms of energy policy. One thing that ought to be common ground, as discussed in a Washington Post column, is increased research in energy R&D. As this chart shows, federal support for energy R&D is smaller than it was […]
Sandra Zellmer | April 23, 2013
Monday was the deadline for public comment on the State Department’s draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Mine, which I submitted with the support of two of my University of Nebraska colleagues, are here. The State Department had initially announced that it would take the unusual path of refusing to make […]
| April 19, 2013
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ended a generation of human rights litigation in the United States by holding, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) does not apply to actions occurring in foreign countries. The ATS allows plaintiffs to sue in federal courts for torts committed in violation of international law […]
Robert L. Glicksman | April 19, 2013
Industries that discharge water pollution are required to abide by clean water laws and regulations that limit how much they can pollute the nation’s rivers, lakes, streams, and other bodies of water. If they exceed their limits or fail to implement appropriate methods for controlling their pollution, they violate the law. Such violations should trigger appropriate sanctions […]
Yee Huang | April 17, 2013
In the decades since Congress and state legislatures passed most of the nation’s most significant environmental laws, our knowledge about ecosystems has increased dramatically. We know much more about the “goods and services” that ecosystems provide—more, for example, about the migratory species that sustain agriculture by functioning as pollinators, and more about how healthy ecosystems […]
Lesley McAllister | April 17, 2013
The following is reposted from the Environmental Law Prof Blog. The electric utility industry often complains that renewable energy proponents don’t pay enough attention to the intermittency of renewable resources. A common refrain is “the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.” The industry then reminds us that, for a reliable electricity grid, supply and demand must be in […]