Public Participation

Heretofore the demonstration that the benefits of a proposed rule exceeded its costs was the only ticket needed to have it promulgated as a final rule.

With the advent of regulatory budgeting the demonstration of positive net benefits for a proposed rule is a necessary but not sufficient condition for its promulgation as a final rule. Furthermore the advent of a regulatory budget harbors the introduction of Social Welfare Functions different from the maximization of national income benefits as the mechanism for ranking proposed rulemakings. The introduction of alternative Social Welfare Functions occurs because the implementation of a regulatory budget requires a public review of the totality of available rulemakings on a government-wide basis and the resultant debates result in the introduction of non-national efficiency considerations such as income distribution and stakeholder segmentation.

Dr. Michael Stumborg, a principal scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis, has published a paper in which he concludes:

Congress should make the data quality provisions of the Information Quality Act applicable to all federal government data, not just publicly disseminated data. The Office of Management and Budget guidelines should provide clear, binding, and quantifiable definitions of “utility,” “objectivity,” and “integrity.” Compliance then becomes measureable, and thus, enforceable.

Congress should also define the terms “influential scientific information,” and “affected parties” to make congressional intentions clear, thereby preventing circumvention of the law by discretionary interpretation.

Here is an easy Miller Analogy question for attorneys and economists: judicial review is to attorneys  as ____ is to economists?

Answer:  benefit-cost analysis

Nonetheless the answer is more complex because attorneys tend to emphasize judicial review and economists tend to emphasize benefit-cost analysis when it comes to both managing the administrative state and in challenging it.

The influence of academicians in our society is underestimated; through their constant flow of publications they establish the administrative record on issues of public policy. Articles in the press come and go but journals are around forever.

Academicians teach future Presidents, Members of Congress, entrepreneurs, judges and their staff as well as future academicians, reporters and other opinion leaders. That said, the administrative record established by academicians could, in some instances, lack completeness. If the resultant void is be closed it is the responsibility of practitioners to do so.

Nonetheless,

Academicians survive because they publish.

The Quality of Life Review (QLR) was the term given to the first centralized regulatory review process administered by OMB. It predated OIRA review by a decade and was utilized by the Nixon and Ford Administrations.

The Quality of Life Review process differed significantly from the one currently in use by OIRA:

(1) Although its two primary components, OMB review and agency analysis of the benefits and cost of rules are the building blocks of all future Executive Orders on centralized regulatory review, the QLR was conducted by the “budget side” of OMB not a standalone office (OIRA) dedicated exclusively to implementing centralized regulatory review.