A Trump SWAT Team for Regulation

A Reagan idea to block and repeal Obama’s rules binge.

You can tell the regulation beat has reached critical political mass when even the folks at Politico are pushing it on the home page. “Obama’s agencies push flurry of ‘midnight’ actions,” the political website reported recently, adding that Republicans are preparing to block or repeal as many as of these and previous rules as possible.

This effort is going to be a political brawl—not least due to resistance from the bureaucracies in the executive branch and perhaps even some political appointees who go native quickly. If Donald Trump wants the deregulation effort to succeed—and it’s essential to promoting faster growth—he and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could take a lesson from the Reagan era and appoint a political SWAT team to direct it from the White House.

The temptation will be to leave it to Congress or the office of regulatory affairs at the White House budget office. But the director of that office might not be confirmed for months, even as appointees in the departments find excuses not to move against Obama rules. Those appointees may want to keep their new political power or they might fear the media backlash, which will often be fierce.

The Reagan White House met this challenge by setting up a special task force to run regulatory policy for the first months of 1981. It was led by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, with a big assist from his general counsel Boyden Gray. Key staff included such policy legends as Jim Miller, who later ran the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and White House budget office; Frank Blake, who would go on to run Home Depot; Jim Tozzi, who would become the ranking career official in the White House regulatory shop; Tim Muris, who ran the FTC under George W. Bush; and Jeffrey Eisenach, now with the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s not too much to say this task force ran much of the government for six months as the new appointees found their sea legs. In one famous February 1981 incident, the general counsels of agencies were called to the White House to review executive order 12291 on regulation. The counsels began to cross out huge chunks until they got to the end and discovered that Ronald Reagan had already signed it. The task force was so successful that Democrats John Dingell and Al Gore hauled some of them up to Capitol Hill for a public scolding.

Democrats also made the director of regulatory affairs subject to Senate confirmation for the first time, so they could haze nominees about opposing new rules. It’s no accident that Reagan was the only recent President to restrain the regulatory state. Neither Bush Administration had any comparable success, and George W. Bush set new records for pages in the Federal Register until President Obama took the crown.

Mr. Trump might consider putting Mike Pence in charge of a regulatory task force with a few key White House aides dedicated to the task. The team needs someone like the Vice President-elect with enough internal clout to keep the agencies in line and back up more junior aides until the regulatory-affairs director is confirmed and on the job.

Deregulation is one of those subjects that makes eyes glaze over, but if the job is done right it can give the economy a crucial boost.

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Note by Jim Tozzi   This post amplifies on the above https://yalejreg.com/nc/a-syllabus-on-oira-by-jim-tozzi/