OIRA@2050

From: Columbia Journalism Review

TSA and border security account for almost all the increase in regulatory staff since 1980

By Ryan Chittum

Bloomberg News story last week on how the folks who oversee the regulators are overmatched these days raises a question: What’s a regulator?

Here’s the lede (emphasis mine)

As the U.S. government’s regulatory bureaucracy has ballooned, one agency has been left behind: the office that oversees the regulators.

The regulatory bureaucracy has ballooned? That doesn’t sound right. The federal workforce, after all, is down over the last forty-plus years, and places like OSHA are shadows of their former selves.

Editor’s Note:  The study “Growth in Regulators’ Budget Slowed by Fiscal Stalemate: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2012 and 2013” is attached below.  The study is published jointly by the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University (St. Louis). 

The report’s Executive Summary is reprinted below.

From: RegBlog

Alisa Melekhina

Since 1993, government agencies have been required by executive order to analyze the broader effects of regulation on “productivity, employment, and competitiveness.” Yet despite this obligation, most of the economic analyses that agencies conduct on their regulations have focused just on the direct benefits and costs of regulatory compliance. Although these immediate impacts are obviously of great importance, the recent economic downturn has made the broader impacts of regulation increasingly salient.

In order to advance research on regulation’s broader economic impacts, the Penn Program on Regulation (PPR) recently hosted a workshop in Washington, D.C., on “Beyond Compliance Costs: The Other Economic Impacts of Regulation.”