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Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011

Sen. McCaskill Joins the Republican Attack on Regulations with Misguided Bill

On Tuesday, Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced the Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act, legislation that offers a number of proposals for jump-starting the economy.  The bill includes two provisions that would hobble the regulatory system without generating the new jobs that the Senators seek. If these provisions were enacted, the bill would […]

Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011

House Passes REINS Act; CPR’s Shapiro Responds

Within the last hour, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act – the REINS Act. The bill was among House Republicans’ top priorities for the year, and they’ve made it and a series of other anti-regulatory bills a centerpiece of their agenda. The plain purpose of the […]

Isaac Shapiro | December 7, 2011

What David Brooks Gets Right — Regulations Aren’t Tanking the Economy — and What He Misses

Cross-posted from the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics blog. Isaac Shapiro is EPI’s Director of Regulatory Policy Research. The House of Representatives is poised to vote for the REINS (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) bill today; this would come on top of votes on two bills last week that would also upend […]

Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011

David Brooks on OIRA

New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of […]

Ben Somberg | December 2, 2011

OIRA’s All-You-Can-Meet Policy in Practice: Indulging Industry Lobbyists (It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way)

The CPR white paper on OIRA earlier this week looked at how this little office within OMB facilitates an industry-dominated process that serves to weaken regulations proposed by federal agencies. Appearances by industry representatives have outnumbered those by public interest lobbyists more than 5-to-1 in meetings at OIRA in the last ten years, the paper […]

Ben Somberg | December 1, 2011

Sweeping Anti-Reg Bills Reach House Floor

The “Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act” (RFIA) and the “Regulatory Accountability Act” (RAA) are headed for votes on the House floor shortly (today and/or tomorrow). The “Gum Up Public Health and Safety Protections Act” apparently wasn’t going to sell as well. A quick recap of the Regulatory Accountability Act, via CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro’s Congressional testimony […]

Sidney A. Shapiro | November 29, 2011

Even More Evidence Disputes Claims that Regulation Is Stalling Economic Recovery, But Regulatory Opponents Continue to Press Their (False) Claims

Republicans in the House have spent much of the fall trying to blame regulation for the nation’s slow economic recovery.  The fact that there is no reasonable evidence to back up this claim is apparently not a concern for the regulatory opponents.  Moreover, regulatory opponents skip entirely over the impacts of the failure to regulate, […]

Rena Steinzor | November 28, 2011

New Report: Behind Closed Doors at the White House, Obama Administration Politicizes the Regulatory Process

When former Harvard Law Professor and eclectic intellectual Cass Sunstein was named administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conservative, industry-oriented Wall Street Journal editorial writers enthused that his appointment was a “promising sign.” A slew of subsequent events has proved their optimism well placed, as we have noted repeatedly in CPRBlog.  […]

Ben Somberg | November 22, 2011

Small Business Owners: Top Concern is Poor Sales. Blanche Lincoln: Top Concern is Regulations.

Former Senator Blanche Lincoln, currently heading an anti-regulatory campaign called “Small Businesses for Sensible Regulation,” appeared on CNBC on Friday to make her case. Lincoln’s been busy trying to use different iterations of a debunked SBA report claiming astronomical costs for regulations. This time she skipped that piece, but offered this take (at 3:15): This […]