The OIRA Module: Published Research

A Calendar  of Current Events     CRE on ABA Conference  Quality of Life Review

Information Collection and Regulatory Budgets

Announcement of the establishment of a website dedicated to the implementation of a regulatory budget, public comments welcome below.

Editor’s Note: The myriad of proposed legislation to control the expansion of the regulatory state fall short in one major aspect–even if enacted in total the cumulative costs of complying with the ever ending flow of regulations will increase. The articles in this precedent setting forum are the initial steps to address this issue.

Tozzi Retrospective Review

Recent scholarship by Mathew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast,1 and by Arthur Lupia and McCubbins,2 sheds new light on animportant administrative law subject: the rationale for and the utility of the procedures that an administrative agency must follow in order to adopt rules.According to the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), an agency must give public notice of a proposed rule and allow any interested person to providewritten comments on that rule.3 The agency must also supply a concise statement of the basis and purpose of a rule when it is adopted.’ A final rule must be published in the Federal Register,5 and its effective date must be delayed until thirty days after publication.

haeder and yackee 2015 influence and the administrative process

All administrative processes contain points of entry for politics, and the U.S. president’s use of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review government regulations is no exception. Specifically, OMB review can open up a pathway for interest groups to lobby for policy change. We theorize that interest group lobbying can be influential during OMB review, especially when there is consensus across groups.We use a selection model to test our argument with more than 1,500 regulations written by federal agencies that were subjected to OMB review. We find that lobbying is associated with change during OMB review. We also demonstrate that, when only business groups lobby, we are more likely to see rule change; however, the same is not true for public interest groups. We supplement these results with illustrative examples suggesting that interest groups can, at times, use OMB review to influence the content of legally binding government regulations.

The Reg Map: Informal Rulemaking

The Federal Rulemaking Process: An Overview

A Guide to Judicial and Political Review of Federal Agencies

A Guide to Federal Agency Rulemaking

Administrative Law for Public Managers

Federal Service and the Constitution: The Development of the Public Employment Relationship

Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector

GAO on OMB Process

Time Line of the Regulatory Process (Potomac Institute)

Heretofore, OIRA was virtually an unknown organization. However most recently in books written about the regulatory state it is appearing with an increasing frequency. For example, Mr. Charles Murray in a book By the People-Rebuilding Liberty without Permission states:

For rules that are deemed to be “significant”—in the Obama administration so far, about 20 percent of the total—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), part of the Office of Management and Budget, will get involved in the process.[ 4 ] OIRA acts as a coordinator with other agencies, provides additional input, mediates disagreements, and is a conduit for the White House’s position on proposed regulations.

Throughout this Forum we have discussed the importance of expanding the stakeholders in centralized regulatory review from the legal community to the public policy, political science and public administration committees. The following reference works highlight the important contribution the non-legal communities can make to the improvement of centralized regulatory review.

• Administrative Law for Public Managers
  
• Federal Service and the Constitution: The Development of the Public Employment Relationship
• Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector

Downloaded from the London School  of Economics Website

More than 2.5 million people work across the entire executive branch of the US government in hundreds of agencies and commissions. William West takes an in-depth look at how the President is able to oversee this vast bureaucracy. He writes that centralized influence over agency policy making is mostly reactive and based around the practice of regulatory review.  He argues that Presidents lack the organizational capacity to monitor and influence what agencies do in more than a selective way, and that this reactive  strategy allows the White House to focus its limited resources on agency initiatives that are problematic while ignoring the majority that are not.

Jim Tozzi Views On Centralized Regulatory Review

• Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and National Archives and Records Administration, An Oral History Interview with JAMES J. TOZZI.

Energy Crisis Interviews: James J. Tozzi

• Richard Nixon Foundation

Confronting America’s First Energy Crisis

• Richard Nixon Foundation, National Archives, Center for Strategic and International Studies, (Ambassador Richard Fairbanks; James R. Schlesinger; and James J. Tozzi)

Centralized Regulatory Review  Officials by Administration

Leading Journal Articles

The OIRA Hall of Fame Library

The Essential Good Government Library