OIRA Watch

 Editor’s Note:  The Editor had the good fortune to work with Ed when he joined OIRA and also had the opportunity to co-author an article with him.  See Ed’s view on a regulatory budget.  Accolades to Brian Mannix for highlighting the contributions of this remarkable public servant.

Remembering Ed Clarke: How Can We Know the Benefits of Public Decisions?

 Brian F. Mannix,

Visiting Scholar  GW Regulatory Studies Center

October 15, 2013

Ed Clarke, who passed away last week, was the first EPA Desk Officer in OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs when it was created in 1981.

 Students of public administration and administrative law have labored for years explaining the independence  or lack thereof  between Executive Branch Agencies and their  counterparts, the often referred to as “Independent Agencies”.

 Whatever ones views may be on the thickness of the wall separating the respective institutions the Editor knows first hand that when these two titans team up they change the regulatory landscape.

 See this post  on another CRE Independent Regulatory Docket.

From: Center for Progressive Reform

Last Friday, Executive Order 12866, which governs the work of OMB’s regulatory review arm, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) reached its 20th anniversary.

Here’s a roundup of their contributions:

David Driesen: Keeping OIRA from Harming Efforts to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

 Who would ever think that the work of specialists in regulatory policy would be of extreme interest to hedge funds? The  article in the Wall Street Journal  posted below provides an explanation.

We at OIRA Watch now understand the many hits on our site from Wall Street.

Open-Government Laws Fuel Hedge-Fund Profits

WSJ   BRODY MULLINS   Christopher Weaver

WASHINGTON—When SAC Capital Advisors LP was weighing an investment in Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., VRTX -1.16%the hedge-fund firm contacted a source it knew would provide nonpublic information without blinking: the federal government.

Much is being written about the use of the social medial in rulemaking.

CRE views differ somewhat from the direction federal authorities are pursuing the matter.

CRE views on the overall game plan.

CRE use of the social media.

         The CRE website was attacked with the result that had we not pulled down the website we would have risked loosing content.

         We appreciate your many emails and we are  working to continue to install state of the art  early warning systems.  We must , however, add that we have only had two major outages in more than a decade of operation.

        We are particularly concerned that some of you could not use the website for the preparation of regulatory filings.

 We appreciate the many responses we received on our previous post regarding Regulation 2.0; several of you asked for our views regarding CRE priorities regarding the social media.

 Here they are:

 Pre and Post Comment Period

 The laudable efforts to date regarding utilizing the social media in rulemaking deal with a very small slice of the rulemaking pie, namely the notice and comment period. However the life of a rulemaking is considerably longer than the often used sixty-day comment period, namely the months — if not years–of agency work during the pre and post comment period. We are not aware of any significant activity in this space.

The IBM Center for the Business of Government as sponsored an extremely informative paper on ways to improve the rulemaking process through greater public participation.

We encourage all of our visitors to read this document, a copy of which is attached below.

We also encourage our readers to note that present day efforts to improve public participation focuses on a typical 60 day public comment period with virtually no attention to the pre and post commet periods; Interactive Public Dockets address this imbalance. More on Interactive Public Dockets here.

The Director of the IBM Center, Dan Chenok, states:

Editor’s Note:  If  Mr. Shelanski gets one new program off and running the retrospective review of existing regulations would be a great legacy. Since the founding of centralized regultory review in OMB  virtually every Administration attempted to address the inefficiences in existing regulations but only the Reagan Administration had a program with demonstrable results — the main reason being that OMB was heavily involved in the process.  See this Reagan Retrospective Review of Regulations on the Reagan program.

Jim Hamilton’s World of Securities

 OIRA continues to set an exemplary example on keeping the public aware of its regulatory review function. In particular it disclosed in considerable detail the substance of a meeting it had on electric utility emission standards dealing with greenhouse gases.

 Accolades to GE for putting on the record its detailed comments. See this document.

 The above meeting is in keeping with Judge Wald’s decision  in Sierra Club v. Costle in which she concluded: