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According to media accounts, President Obama today nominated Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein to be the director of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — the so-called "regulatory czar."  CPR President Rena Steinzor reacts to the news: I welcome Cass Sunstein’s nomination to be the Obama Administration’s regulatory czar. His past support for cost-benefit […]

Say you live in an urban neighborhood where crime is worrisome but not overwhelming. The police are chronically understaffed, with no money to walk the beat, and instead depend on what we might call a “deterrence-based enforcement system” – making high-profile arrests, prosecuting the worst violators, and relying on the resulting publicity to frighten others […]

On Wednesday, April 1, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Entergy vs. EPA, holding that it was permissible for EPA to use cost-benefit analysis as its method of regulatory analysis in devising a regulation on power plant water intake structures.  Member Scholar Amy Sinden blogged on the decision that day, here.  Member Scholar Thomas […]

The Supreme Court today upheld a decision from the Bush administration’s EPA that was good for industry and bad for the environmental health of our rivers and estuaries (my brief press statement on the case, Entergy v. EPA, is here; the court’s decision is here).  But the majority opinion by Justice Scalia was written narrowly […]

Two years ago, a pair of well-meaning economists, Richard Morgenstern and Winston Harrington, who work at the moderate think tank Resources for the Future (RFF) got a large grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation to convene a group of well-credentialed academics to consider how to improve “cost-benefit analysis” (CBA). Unfortunately, their long-awaited report, released at […]

More than 100 groups and individuals have accepted the invitation from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to comment on the new Executive Order on Regulatory Review that the Obama Administration is currently considering.  The extended submission deadline is March 31.  So far, the comments reflect a strikingly wide dividing line between regulatory opponents, […]

In his appearance on Jay Leno’s show last night, President Obama argued (video, transcript) for financial regulations by making a comparison between credit cards, mortgages, and toasters: “When you buy a toaster, if it explodes in your face there’s a law that says your toasters need to be safe. But when you get a credit […]

The financial cataclysm gripping the country is often (and rightly) blamed on a lax system of public and private oversight of financial institutions. On the private side, investors trusted huge auditing companies like Arthur Anderson to rate multinational corporations for fiscal soundness. Meanwhile, Arthur Anderson also took handsome fees from the same corporations to conduct […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) invited public comments on the design of its new Executive Order on regulatory review, and CPR has now submitted our recommendations. We urged the Obama Administration to make fundamental changes in how OMB and prospective “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein operate. We're hopeful that the new Administration will convert […]