From: Indiana Legal Studies Research Paper No. 408
Forthcoming in The Continuing Relevance of Private International Law and Its Challenges (F. Ferrari & D. Fernandez Arroyo eds., Elgar)
Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law
Date Written: 2019
From: Notice & Comment | A Blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice
by Reeve Bull and Jerry Ellig
Part I—The Rise of Regulatory Impact Analysis
The concept of disciplining regulatory choices through the application of benefit-cost analysis to regulatory decisionmaking is largely an American innovation. As Jim Tozzi has shown, the idea of economic assessment of proposed rules goes back to the Johnson Administration. Presidents Carter and Reagan issued the executive orders that created the modern system of regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) and executive review within the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which has been reaffirmed by every subsequent administration.
From: Real Clear Policy
By Jerry Ellig
The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has started reviewing a draft of a final Internal Revenue Service regulation that seeks to prevent taxpayers from avoiding the cap on state and local tax deductions (colloquially known as the “SALT cap.”) Unfortunately, the version of the regulation the IRS proposed last August would also impose collateral damage on legitimate charities and taxpayers who are below the SALT cap. The administration can remedy those problems if it uses the OIRA review process to enforce some basic principles that have guided executive branch regulatory development for four decades.
Editor’s Note: “Strategic planning with political oversight halved the number of regulatory proposals….” Perhaps the Better Regulation program is a de facto regulatory budget under another name.
From: The Regulatory Review
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From: Wired
Eric Niiler
Government usually isn’t the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.
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Engstrom and a team of law school and computer science students at Stanford are studying how AI can be better used in US government agencies. They will soon report their findings to the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency charged with recommending improvements to administrative processes.
From: Harvard Law Review
From: OECD Regulatory Policy Working Papers
Daniel Trnka, Yola Thuerer
Governments are increasingly trying to limit the costs of regulatory compliance. One of the approaches that has been gaining ground in the last five years is the “one-in, x-out rule”, or the offsetting of regulatory costs stemming from new regulations by reducing the existing regulatory stock. This paper presents examples of regulatory offsetting approaches in selected OECD countries. By comparing the different approaches and discussing their key features, the paper provides guidance to countries considering introducing regulatory offsetting. This paper finds that there are many methodological and implementation issues that need to be resolved before a government decides to use a one-in, x-out approach as part of its regulatory policy. Key suggestions for countries introducing regulatory offsetting include i) ensuring a solid methodology for calculating regulatory costs; ii) linking the responsibility for finding offsets to the “owners” of regulation; iii) setting up quality oversight mechanisms; iv) securing strong political commitment and support and v) implementing regulatory offsetting as a complement to other regulatory management tools.
From: The Regulatory Review
History can help explain the politics of regulation, but only if we first understand that there are different kinds of regulation out there. For example, one might usefully—if imperfectly—distinguish economic regulation—that is, the intensive regulation of specific industries in ways that often manage the supply or price of certain goods or both—from social regulation—that is, the protection of the public from general social harms, such as pollution or unsafe workplaces.
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From: The Regulatory Review
To be sure, the Trump Administration has continued the slow refinement and modernization of cost-benefit analysis. But by and large, the work of OIRA reflects the work of the Reagan Administration, the Clinton Administration, and the rest. The Reagan Administration’s formal codification and extension of practices that had arisen organically from the Nixon Administration onward succeeded in entrenching OIRA as a major institution of governance, and the Trump Administration is simply the latest Administration to maintain its inheritance.
From: Notice & Comment | A Blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice
by Jim Tozzi
Arguments are frequently made to the effect that if the benefits of a regulation exceed its costs, the regulation should promulgated. Here is a succinct statement as to why the aforementioned statement is flawed.
