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The regulatory policy world is often a sleepy one — I’m the first to admit that — but last week was a notable exception. In addition to a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on regulations, the Biden administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) wrapped up efforts to solicit public input on its recommendations for broadening public input in the regulatory process.

The Delaware River Basin is a vital ecosystem that provides drinking water for millions of people and supports diverse wildlife, recreation, and agriculture in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Unfortunately, industrial activities in the basin contaminate the water with toxic pollutants, leading to a variety of negative impacts on human health and the environment and endangering industrial workers.

The regulatory system is a vital part of our constitutional democracy; with smart reforms, it can empower the public and continue enforcing policies that make us all safer, healthier, and freer. That was the message that Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Reform successfully conveyed during last Friday’s subcommittee hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

In today's "point" post on this blog, Member Scholar Richard Pierce described how centralized regulatory review conducted by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is effective in ensuring the democratic accountability of the administrative state. In this companion post, I’ll offer a competing view of whether centralized review fulfills this objective in practice and what that means for the standards and safeguards designed to protect our health, safety, and lives.

Last week, the Biden administration took the next step on its important initiative to “broaden public engagement in the federal regulatory process,” announcing a set of proposed reforms and asking for more public feedback. As the announcement explains, these proposals reflect input the administration received during a public listening session and an open comment period it conducted last November — both of which I participated in along with several members of the public interest community. I was pleased to find that many of our recommendations were reflected in the proposals.

On February 8, conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives began their assault on the Clean Water Act with a hearing aimed at attacking the Biden administration’s rule to more clearly define the law's scope of protections. Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco, was the only witness invited to fend off these dangerous attacks.

“Finish the job” was a fitting theme for President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address. It provided a valuable oratorical perch from which Biden could both tout his impressive legislative successes of the last two years and call on Congress to pass laws that, to quote Biden himself, help build an economy and support a society “from the bottom up and the middle out.” But Biden needs to heed his own call to “finish the job.”

Where are President Joe Biden’s regulatory process reforms? That’s the question many progressive advocates have been asking since the administration released its Day One memo inaugurating a “process with the goal of producing a set of recommendations for improving and modernizing regulatory review.” Two years later, this process remains in limbo.

The federal judiciary is in crisis. Now stocked with conservative jurists who openly disdain the courts’ limited constitutional role and actively dismiss the public they serve, this critical branch of our government presents an unacceptable risk to the stability of our democracy and economy. But there are solutions at hand.