Looking Back on the Presidents' Policy Wonks
By Cindy Skrzycki
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; D01
Staffed by only 50 men and
women, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is in its 25th
year of overseeing the federal rulemaking bureaucracy. Next Monday, the AEI-Brookings
Joint Center for Regulatory Studies will gather four OIRA administrators
and others in the regulatory nexus to examine how various presidents have used
that oversight function to achieve political and policy goals.
The conference, and the
recent announcement by OIRA Administrator John Graham that he will be
leaving early next year, provide an opportunity to review the evolution of the
office, part of the Office of Management and Budget .
Most of the nine office
administrators have left a stamp on OIRA's operation that reflects the
regulatory philosophy of the administration in power. Some were public in their
positions, while others were wizard-like, hiding behind an impenetrable
curtain. All had power to shape regulatory policy that would affect business,
public interest groups and, in many cases, every American. They are the Supreme
Policy Wonks.
The office reviews about
600 of the 4,000 or so rules that the federal government issues each year,
those with an impact of at least $100 million on the economy. It has authority
to set procedures for agencies' scientific and economic assessment of rules and
to change or kill proposals that don't jibe with an administration's political
agenda. The administrator is the only staff member subject to Senate approval.
"It's the best job I
ever had," said Sally Katzen , the administrator in the Clinton
administration. "It really was a license to kibbutz in virtually anything
in the regulatory world. I was once introduced as the woman who deals with
everything from hot pants to chicken [expletive]." The remark was directed
at her oversight of a rule requiring construction workers to cover their legs
and how to regulate chicken fecal matter in the slaughtering process.
The office is said to have
the creme de la creme of staff members, who always have called the
administrator by first name. Its alumni have fanned out over the years into
other influential top posts. James Miller III , the first administrator,
went on to head the Federal Trade Commission and OMB. Christopher
DeMuth , who succeeded Miller, runs AEI. And Wendy Gramm , a
professional economist, became head of the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission .
OIRA was preceded by other
regulatory oversight bodies in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. But
the process of actually reviewing rules, and changing them, began when the
office was set up under the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 and President
Ronald Reagan gave it the authority.
"My role at OIRA was
to say, 'Stop,' " Miller said. "We told them [the agencies] what they
had to do to pass muster. We put in a filter that said rules had to have a
certain substance and meet certain criteria."
Gary Bass , founder and executive director of
OMB Watch , a public-interest group created in 1983 in part to monitor
OIRA, said the office was "the Marine Corps of agencies" in its early
years. "They would come in and run right over you. They overrode the
agencies. They threatened budget cuts."
The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce said the Reagan administration used the office effectively as a
traffic cop. Since then, said William Kovacs , the chamber's vice
president of regulatory affairs, OIRA administrators have had varying degrees
of success in controlling the output of rules, supervising the agencies and
supporting the business community in Republican administrations.
"The agencies still
run the show. They have the expertise and the scientists. They can baffle them
at OIRA," he said.
Public-interest groups take
the opposite view.
Thomas McGarity , a scholar with the Center for
Progressive Reform , which advocates effective use of government to protect
people, said there is no oversight of OIRA by the current Republican Congress.
McGarity said the office's
administration of the Data Quality Act, which passed in 2000, allows outside
challenges to data used by federal agencies in rulemaking and has
"tremendous potential for mischief."
Some public-interest groups
credit Graham's tenure for bringing more transparency to the process of rule
review. Meetings with outside parties are listed on the office's Web site, as
are correspondence with agencies. But they still think OIRA decisions usually
favor corporate interests.
"It used to be a sledgehammer
approach; now it's an ice pick. It's more sculpted and surgical," said
Bass, comparing the treatment of rules in earlier Republican administrations
with this one's.
Graham said when he took
the job in 2001 that OIRA would act as more of a gatekeeper than a counselor --
as it had in the Clinton years when the review process with the agencies was
more collegial.
He made cost-benefit
analysis and risk assessment paramount in the creation and review of rules and
drew heavy criticism for promoting what came to be known as the "senior
death discount." This was an analysis that placed less monetary value on
an older person's life.
He issued guidelines for
how scientific information should be peer-reviewed. And he hired new experts in
the areas of toxicology, epidemiology, public health, engineering and risk
assessment -- allowing OIRA to better go head to head with agency expertise.
Graham and his staff sent
back 26 agency rules, compared with 13 during the Clinton years and 290 during
the Reagan administration. Increasingly, OIRA worked with agencies early in the
review-writing process, signaling that early cooperation might avoid a return
letter later.
Robert Hahn , director of the Joint Center
, a project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings
Institution , said he hoped this alumni reunion, of sorts, will be the
forum for a serious retrospective where "we engage these folks in a
constructive dialogue about what they did right or wrong and how to improve
things."