OIRA@2050

Editor’s Note:  Regulatory review is a natural and appropriate function for OMBs, including those at the state level.

From: WGMD.com

OMB Sets Public Hearing Schedule for Review of Agency Regulations

From: RegBlog

Jerry Ellig, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and John Morrall

Federal regulatory activity surges during the final quarter of presidential election years that result in a change in administrations. Scholars  such  as Jay Cochran, Antony Davies and Veronique de Rugy, and Anne Joseph O’Connell have well-documented the phenomenon of “midnight regulations” promulgated between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

One  common criticism of midnight regulations is that the quality of analysis accompanying these regulations is likely to be lower than those accompanying earlier or later regulations, possibly because more regulatory activity tends to stretch the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’s limited resources for reviewing regulations  — and perhaps also taxes agencies’  own resources.

From: WSJ/Letter to the Editor

As your editorial “EPA Smack-Down Number Six” (Aug. 22) points out, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s remand of EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) is indeed a setback for the Obama administration. But perhaps the biggest embarrassment is that it undermines the administration’s oft-repeated claims that its smarter regulators have generated much higher benefits than have previous administrations. According to the Office of Management and Budget estimates, CSAPR contributes over 40% of the $90 billion per year in net benefits which the administration claims from all regulations issued since January 2009. As my analysis in the current issue of the journal Business Economics shows, these benefit estimates should be viewed with considerable skepticism. But even taking them at face value, the Obama administration’s claims of regulatory genius compared to its predecessors are on shaky ground, especially now that the court has found one of its signature rules to be illegal.