White House Sets Up Cross-Agency Battle To Pay For New Regulations [excerpt]

This is likely to set up a political battle among agencies, with the White House the broker. “There's a decision maker in charge, they get to decide, but let's be real, there are always politics,” Bruce Levinson, senior vice president of regulatory intervention at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, told IHP. “Politics is the process through which policy gets made,” he added.

The guidance puts the White House budget shop’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs “in the cockpit” to determine how new regulatory actions by departments and agencies are treated, Levinson notes. “The OIRA Desk Officer is the regulatory watchdog, to ensure agencies do not use backdoors, use guidances and interpretative documents as backdoors, to get around the President's goals,” Levinson said.

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