OIRA@2050

From: Administrative Conference of the United States

Washington, December 15, 2017 – At its 68th Plenary Session, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) Assembly formally adopted the five following recommendations.

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Agency Guidance, which was adopted as Recommendation 2017-5, provides best practices to agencies on the formulation and use of guidance documents. https://www.acus.gov/research-projects/agency-guidance.

Regulatory Experimentation, which was adopted as Recommendation 2017-6, offers advice to agencies on learning from different regulatory approaches. It encourages agencies to collect data, conduct analysis at all stages of the rulemaking lifecycle (from pre-rule analysis to retrospective review), and solicit public input at appropriate points in the process. https://www.acus.gov/research-projects/regulatory-experimentation.

From: The Wall Street Journal

A Wall Street Journal investigation uncovered thousands of fraudulent posts on agencies’ dockets, in hot-button areas such as net neutrality and payday lending

By James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg

A comment posted on the Federal Communications Commission’s public docket endorses a Trump-administration plan to repeal a “net neutrality” policy requiring internet providers to treat all web traffic the same.

Read Complete Article [paywall]

From: Administrative Conference of the United States

Submitted by Todd Rubin

Making sound regulatory decisions demands information and analysis. Several ACUS recommendations encourage agencies to gather data when making new rules and when reviewing existing rules. These recommendations reinforce analytic demands imposed on agencies by legislation, executive orders, and judicial decisions.

Editor’s Note: See the RegBlog “Valuing Professional Government” series of essays in which “scholars and government professionals review [the] new book by former Chair of the Administrative Conference of the United States,” here.

From: RegBlog

Paul R. Verkuil

The key to improving government is to strengthening—and valuing—excellence in the civil service.

During my five and a half years of service as Chair of the Administrative Conference of the United States, I observed closely how bureaucracy functions. What I found during that time is that career officials—the indispensable professionals on which government vitally depends—are being discouraged, ignored, or even displaced. In their stead, federal agencies are relying on a private contractor regime that far outstrips members of the civil service in numbers and, increasingly, in influence. In many respects, we are seeing core officials lose control, at all levels, of the system that administers public policies and delivers government services.