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As it turns out, many of the same people who deny that climate change is a problem also deny that government default would be a problem.  No doubt there are several reasons: the fact that Barack Obama is on the opposite side of both issues; the general impermeability of ideologues to facts or expert opinion; […]

Yesterday, the Hill published an op-ed by Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Joel A. Mintz entitled, “The Government Shutdown and the EPA: the Environmental Dangers of Congressional Recklessness.” It can be read in full here. According to Mintz: The indefinite close down of EPA’s operations poses major risks, some imminent and others long term, to the […]

Last Friday, Executive Order 12866, which governs the work of OMB’s regulatory review arm, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) reached its 20th anniversary. Center for Progressive Reform scholars marked the anniversary by examining the Order’s reach and OIRA’s influence on the regulatory process including on the issues of transparency, timeliness and the […]

Ever wonder how Professor Tom McGarity knows about all those delays in regulatory review? Or how Professor Lisa Heinzerling learns about food safety regulations that the White House appears to be burying? Well, now you too can be an OIRA ninja. In President Obama’s first term, the White House introduced an interactive Web portal stocked […]

A series of catastrophic regulatory failures have focused attention on the weakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority have set the stage for ineffective enforcement, unsupervised industry self-regulation, and a slew of devastating […]

As indicated by the 20th anniversary of Executive Order 12866, which guides the workings of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at OMB, OIRA has become a fixture of the regulatory landscape.  OIRA review of proposed rules is problematic, as other blogs in this series have indicated.   In the Obama administration, however, this […]

This blog explains why President Obama should exempt proposals to mitigate climate disruption by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from OIRA review. First, the procedure that justifies OIRA review, cost-benefit analysis (CBA), just does not work for climate disruption measures. Second, CBA undermines just and legal climate policy. Third, climate disruption poses special risks that make […]

On this 20th anniversary of the regulatory review regime of Executive Order 12,866, the appropriate thing to do would be to take stock. Has centralized regulatory review, on balance, improved the quality of federal regulation or interfered with it?   Is this now-extensive regulatory review process worth it, given its costs? Sadly, the opaque quality of the process […]

It was 20 years ago this week that President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866.   That was a watershed of sorts, because it marked the adoption by a Democratic administration of a key aspect of President Reagan’s anti-regulatory agenda — the requirement that all major federal regulations undergo cost-benefit analysis.  This was not a move that […]