The OIRA Module: Published Research

From: Wired

Eric Niiler

Government usually isn’t the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.

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Engstrom and a team of law school and computer science students at Stanford are studying how AI can be better used in US government agencies. They will soon report their findings to the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency charged with recommending improvements to administrative processes.

From: Harvard Law Review

Commentary by Cass R. Sunstein

From: OECD Regulatory Policy Working Papers

Daniel Trnka, Yola Thuerer

Governments are increasingly trying to limit the costs of regulatory compliance. One of the approaches that has been gaining ground in the last five years is the “one-in, x-out rule”, or the offsetting of regulatory costs stemming from new regulations by reducing the existing regulatory stock. This paper presents examples of regulatory offsetting approaches in selected OECD countries. By comparing the different approaches and discussing their key features, the paper provides guidance to countries considering introducing regulatory offsetting. This paper finds that there are many methodological and implementation issues that need to be resolved before a government decides to use a one-in, x-out approach as part of its regulatory policy. Key suggestions for countries introducing regulatory offsetting include i) ensuring a solid methodology for calculating regulatory costs; ii) linking the responsibility for finding offsets to the “owners” of regulation; iii) setting up quality oversight mechanisms; iv) securing strong political commitment and support and v) implementing regulatory offsetting as a complement to other regulatory management tools.

From: The Regulatory Review

Jefferson Decker

Presidents Reagan and Trump differ on approaches to social and economic regulation.

History can help explain the politics of regulation, but only if we first understand that there are different kinds of regulation out there. For example, one might usefully—if imperfectly—distinguish economic regulation—that is, the intensive regulation of specific industries in ways that often manage the supply or price of certain goods or both—from social regulation—that is, the protection of the public from general social harms, such as pollution or unsafe workplaces.

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From: The Regulatory Review

Adam J. White

To be sure, the Trump Administration has continued the slow refinement and modernization of cost-benefit analysis. But by and large, the work of OIRA reflects the work of the Reagan Administration, the Clinton Administration, and the rest. The Reagan Administration’s formal codification and extension of practices that had arisen organically from the Nixon Administration onward succeeded in entrenching OIRA as a major institution of governance, and the Trump Administration is simply the latest Administration to maintain its inheritance.

From: Notice & Comment | A Blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice

by Jim Tozzi

Arguments are frequently made to the effect that if the benefits of a regulation exceed its costs, the regulation should promulgated. Here is a succinct statement as to why the aforementioned statement is flawed.

From: The Regulatory Review

Susan Dudley

Ever since Congress created the first federal regulatory body more than 130 years ago, people have debated the proper role for what has been called the “fourth branch” of government. This essay provides a brief history of regulation and deregulation, reviewing the key milestones that have shaped regulatory practices in the United States from the mid-1900s to the presidency of Donald J. Trump.