The Federal Financial Forum

Subsequent to the issuance of the Executive Order on modernization of the regulatory process numerous experts have written on its impact. Many of the authors claim that the Administration is bending the rules on the conduct of benefit-cost analyses of rules and suggest that the aforementioned action dwarfs other directives in the Executive Order.   It is a safe bet that none of the aforementioned authors are familiar with the history of OIRA.

That said, is  the absence of a knowledge of the history of OIRA a handicap in interpreting  the significance of current events? Please note that OIRA became a functioning unit only after its predecessors survived the scrutiny of five consecutive Presidential Administrations, a nod to its history.

Will the Biden Administration address a growing weakness in OIRA oversight responsibilities, namely the management of the administrative state?  Presently management of the Administrative state has been addressed in large part by the economics and legal professions who have made noteworthy contributions. That said, neither of these profession per se had a major role in establishing the Quality of Life Review or Executive 12291, the bulwarks of centralized regulatory review.

                                                                            ALR       JBCA    Yale-ABA

                                                                           2021 

The CRE website contains thousands of pages of information dealing with centralized regulatory review, OIRA and the evolution of benefit-cost analysis as it is applied to federal rulemaking,

Deep in the website there is a list of nearly 500 handpicked (by CRE) journal  articles  related to the aforementioned subjects. When a search term is placed in the search engine it scans the journal articles as well as the  thousands of pages of text created by CRE and its collaborators.

Editor’s  Note: What a pleasant way to begin the New Year by not allowing the concepts of judicial review and benefit-cost analysis, however significant, to  virtually overwhelm  all discussions of OIRA.

OIRA is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. At  its founding some members of Congress would stomach the establishment of an office to oversee federal agency regulators which theretofore they believed to be solely under their jurisdiction  only on the condition that the new office would address the broad issue of “information”.  Please note “information” precedes “regulatory” in OIRA’s title.