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Following up on President Obama’s January Executive Order calling for agencies to conduct a regulatory “look-back,” the Administration today released a target list of health, safety, and environmental standards to be reviewed by agencies in the coming months, with an eye toward eliminating or modifying them. The President’s January announcement was driven by politics, and […]

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein heads to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday morning to speak about federal agencies’ plans to “look back” at and review existing regulations. Meanwhile, agencies statutorily obligated to protect public health and safety, such as EPA and OSHA, are diverting resources from pressing work so that […]

EPA announced Wednesday that it is delaying the reporting period for its Inventory Update Reporting requirement. It’s not good news. EPA had announced its intention to revise (pdf) the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR) back in August of last year. The TSCA Inventory is the official list of chemicals in commerce, and the IUR is the […]

This great country of ours is quite fond of its enduring myths: poor kids are able to become rich kids by working hard, the family farm feeds us a nutritious bounty, and small business is the engine that makes our economy sing. When most of us hear that musical phrase—smaaaall business—we think of the local florist, […]

We noted earlier this month that a U.S. Small Business Administration official had claimed that the danger of workplace noise was solved just as well with earplugs as it is with reducing the noise at its source — despite extensive research to the contrary (“Presidential Appointee at SBA Maligns OSHA’s Industrial Noise Proposal; Claims Ear […]

It's their favorite figure: $1.75 Trillion. Repeated ad nauseam in congressional hearings by members of congress and expert witnesses alike, it is the supposed annual cost of regulations, this according to a study from last year commissioned by the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy. Sponsors of anti-regulatory legislation like the number: Olympia Snowe and […]

Right about this time a year ago, Americans were learning about a massive explosion aboard an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico called the Deepwater Horizon that had occurred the day before. Video footage of the flame-engulfed rig began splashing across television screens, and we were told that 11 workers on […]

So far as regulatory safeguards are concerned, we’ve come a long way in 27 months. The Obama Administration started with federal agencies that had been devastated by eight years of an explicitly anti-regulatory president. Turning that around is not easy, and no President could do it in a day. So, as much as you see […]

Claudia Rodgers, Deputy Chief Council for the Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, testified earlier this month at a hearing conducted by a House Oversight and Government Reform sub-committee. The session ("Assessing The Impact of Greenhouse Gas Regulations on Small Business") was a sparsely attended affair on all sides of the room. […]