Professor Rena Steinzor, a talented and well respected member of the legal community and a member held in high regard of the friendly opposition, has published an article titled “The Case for Abolishing Centralized White House Regulatory Review in the inaugural issue of Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law.
Hats off to the Professor for being the first author to state unequivocally that centralized regulatory review began in the Nixon Administration. Unlike other authors she did not say it was a modest effort or a pilot for the future but simply that that the Nixon White House was the first to control the regulatory state by exercising OMB control over agency regulations.
It should be noted that the majority of the agency regulatory failures identified in the Professor’s– article took place outside the purview of OIRA and thus are the result of agency appointed officials– the individuals whom the author believes should replace OIRA.
In anticipation of this article, the editor of this forum made the following statement several months ago regarding proposals to abolish centralized regulatory review:
‘The editor anticipated such an event some thirty years ago upon his departure from OMB as reported in the article entitled The Twenty Years War published in the National Journal in 1983 reporting on his note to the federal regulatory community.
The editor, and eight consecutive Presidential Administrations, believes there is a convincing case for a continuation of centralized regulatory review as set forth in this article in the American Bar Association – American University Law School sponsored Administrative Law Review and the attendant article in the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Forum. Coincidentally and collectively these two publications address topics identical to the subject matter of the new journal.
The editor waited fifty years to write the two aforementioned articles; it appears that the timing could not have been better.”
