White House Asks For Preliminary Cost Estimates Of Upcoming Regs [excerpt]

Levinson noted that the March 31 deadline and the detail of the document shows that OIRA is not trying to "create a quick facade," and that they are committed to implementing Trump's regulatory overhaul.

"They are asking for 2018 data now. They are serious. This is where you can see the advanced planning you need. This is the early early stages, it's more than the formal kickoff," Bruce Levinson, senior vice president of regulatory intervention at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, told Inside Health Policy.

"It undermines the integrity of the regulatory database, if they are not working on something, why are they saying that they are working on it? This is a transparency issue. We need to understand what is going on, and this is a step towards that," Levinson told IHP.

Levinson called the memo a solid step towards ensuring the Unified Agenda is a useful database, saying "there's been a lot of sloppiness" and that the memo is a "commitment to cleaning up the database."

"On one hand, it's something very routine with a few modifications, but it's also...the real kickoff of the regulatory budgeting process. What they are doing here is putting together the regulatory database that the regulatory budget will be based on," Levinson said to IHP. "I see this as a larger issue. This is a very mechanical memorandum, this is nuts and bolts, really making the gears turn. I think it is really good. I think OIRA is doing what OIRA's job is to do."

Full article