Archive for October, 2017
APPAM Panel Paper: Presidentially Directed Policy Change
Oct 31st
Editor’s Note: The complete paper “Presidentially Directed Policy Change” is available here.
From: APPAM
Saturday, November 4, 2017
U.S. presidents—working through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—influence administrative agencies by directing agencies to modify their regulatory policy proposals before finalization. We identify two competing hypotheses from the literature to explain this presidential intervention. First, some scholars hypothesize that presidents are more likely to change proposals when the submitting agency’s political ideology differs from the president’s. Second, others argue that presidents are more likely to correct ideologically extreme agencies of either political ideology. Neither claim has been adequately investigated. We study almost 1,500 final regulations reviewed by OIRA between 2005 and 2011. In the end, neither hypothesis garners support. Instead, we demonstrate that regulations proposed by liberally-oriented agencies are more likely to be changed—and the content of the rules changed to a greater degree—than conservative agencies. These results provide suggestive support for a provocative third hypothesis: presidentially-directed deregulation via OIRA review.
Regulatory Reform Should Be About Strengthening Legislative Responsibility
Oct 23rd
From: The Regulatory Review
Countries like Australia and Canada offer models for reining in delegation of lawmaking authority to agencies.
The Trump Administration’s deregulation efforts have so far made some progress in stemming the growth of federal rulemaking. New analysis from the Heritage Foundation finds that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which conducts reviews of agency analyses of significant new regulations, has carried out the fewest reviews of new rules since record-keeping began in the 1990s.
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Internal Administrative Law
Oct 10th
From: Michigan Law Review
Gillian E. Metzger & Kevin M. Stack, Internal Administrative Law, 115 Mich. L. Rev. 1239 (2017).