From: WashingtonPost/Opinions
By Sally Katzen
Sally Katzen served in the Office of Management and Budget as administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 1993 to 1998 and deputy director for management from 1999 to 2001. She is a senior adviser at the Podesta Group and a visiting professor at New York University School of Law.
In November 1995, as a senior policy official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), I sat at a table with OMB Director Alice Rivlin and Deputy Director for Management John Koskinen as we prepared for an impending government shutdown.
From: FierceGovernment
By Ryan McDermott
he Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs doesn’t need legislation to reform the way it reviews regulations, OIRA Administrator Howard Shelanski told the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on regulatory reform, commercial and antitrust law in a Sept. 30 hearing.
“We’ve got a good set of executive orders that set forward I think the right analytic principles and the right regulatory process for reviewing rules,” Shelanski told the panel.
Shelanski said legislation would lock in a “one size fits all” procedure when OIRA needs different way for dealing with different kinds of regulation.
From: The Claremont Institute
By Brian Callanan
“It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one,” wrote a young Woodrow Wilson in 1887. Impatient with the American fixation on constitutional forms, Wilson famously called for the development of a homegrown science of bureaucratic administration. The science of curbing executive power, he urged, must now give way to the science of perfecting it—of “discovering the least irritating means of governing.”
From: The Harvard Law Record — Independent at Harvard Law School Since 1946
Professor Sunstein recently returned to HLS after 3 years as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a position he described as being in the “cockpit of the regulatory state.”
The Socratic Method: As you may know, the Harvard Law Record has been online-only for a while and we are bringing back a print edition. We thought it would be interesting to talk about legal education and the role of Harvard Law School in American society with a number of professors. To start with, when and why did you decide to become a law professor?
From: Beye Network
by Dr. Ramon Barquin
The Federal CIO Council (CIOC) has been around since the mid-1990s. It was created by Executive Order (EO) 13011 of July 16, 1996, which addressed a series of items dealing with federal information technology.
In typical Washington fashion, the White House had to issue EO 13011 in order to get agencies to implement many of the provisions mandated by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 and the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996, better known as the Clinger-Cohen Act. Eventually, many of the provisions of EO 13011 were incorporated into a statute of its own, the E-Government Act of 2002.
From: RegBlog
Cass R. Sunstein
I want to conclude my discussion of the myths and realities of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) by saying something about costs and benefits – and about politics. Costs and benefits are really important. I went into OIRA being a fan of cost-benefit analysis. As with Bruce Springsteen, where the more you hear him the better he sounds, the same is true, I think, with cost-benefit analysis.
From: RegBlog
Cass R. Sunstein
So far we have covered the internal process of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). There’s also OIRA’s external meetings, something that’s gotten a lot of attention in academic circles and which actually bears on political life generally. OIRA will meet with anyone who wants to come in and talk about a rule under review. One thing that I did was to rework our web site, RegInfo.gov. I’m sure some of you probably already go on it, but RegInfo.gov has all the rules under review, and it’s extremely clear. You can see it all at a glance. If anyone wants to come in and talk to OIRA about a rule under review, please do.
From: Roll Call
More Resources for Regulatory Review Would Benefit Consumers
By Jerry Ellig and Rosemarie Fike
Regulatory advocates charge that 120 regulations are “stalled” at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the office that reviews executive branch regulations before they can be proposed or finalized. OIRA was singled out for criticism at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis,” held just before the August recess. On the other side of the Capitol, OIRA Administrator Howard Shelanski told the House Small Business Committee that this year’s sequester and furloughs have limited OIRA’s ability to conduct retrospective reviews of regulations.
From: Maclean’s
Obama’s ‘invisible hand’ talks ‘regulatory moneyball’ and the potential of policy based on data-driven, cost-benefit analysis
by Luiza Ch. Savage
He is called “the most evil, dangerous man in America” and Barack Obama’s “invisible hand.” Conservatives and progressives alike distrusted his project to use government power to shape human behaviour in ways that people may not even notice. He endured a tumultuous Senate confirmation, battled conspiracy theories and even fended off death threats in his job as the director of OIRA—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—an obscure-sounding but powerful office that has the final say on government rules about everything from air pollution to product safety.
From: Office of Management and Budget/OMBlog
Posted by Howard Shelanski
Truck drivers have a tough job, and one that is essential to the U.S. economy. They work for small businesses and large; many are small business owners in their own right. They put in long days on the road. And at the beginning and end of every one of those days, they have to inspect their trucks and file a report—even if they don’t find any problems. It’s a lot of paperwork—about 50 million hours per year, if you add up all the daily inspection reports filed by drivers across the country.