Regulatory Pacesetters

The magazine, Government Executive, the de facto historian of critical events within the Executive Branch, has published a precedential article on the inner workings of the administrative state via Trump; please see Government Executive Interview on OIRA and Trump.

Bottom Line

President Carter signed the Paperwork Reduction Act on December 11, 1980 making it unique in the history of the  Presidency in that oversight would be exercised over one component of the administrative state on a daily basis by intervening in its insatiable appetite for more information.  It should be noted that this landmark effort was preceded some nine years earlier by another precedential action which gave the President oversight authority over environmental, health and safety regulation, the Nixon Quality of Life Review, which provided the information base for designing process changes championed by the Ford, Carter and Reagan Administrations.

    ALR       JBCA       Yale-ABA

Options for the Management of the  Administrative State 

After forty years of existence, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) housed in the White House Office of Management and Budget has demonstrated that it is the fulcrum of the administrative state. In the establishment of OIRA the Congress, and subsequently the President, rightfully made one person publicly accountable for the numerous federal regulatory actions taken each day within the Administrative State. That said OIRA is one of the very few institutions that has the President’s back when well intentioned appointees to federal agencies fail to recognize that their actions are often guided by a natural migration toward a silo mentality. It are these actions to which the public holds the President accountable every four years.

The Library

• OIRA and its Origins:  Implications for Management of the Administrative State
• Magna Carta:  Current Events
• Magna Carta:   Analysis

The Program

CRE has just completed its analysis of the contribution that three professions,  economics, law and political science, make to the management of the administrative state. Although select parties in each of the aforementioned professions have made notable contributions to the effective working of the administrative state, we discovered that management improvement is not the long suit of their professions taken as whole.  Yes, we use the term “management” because whether or not the administrative state is constitutional it plays a dominant role in society, in part because of the increasing interdependency of its citizenry.  Consequently  the efforts herein  are focused on  managing the administrative state —  not destroying it. In other words make the best of it.

Headline by CRE

Washington Post

09/18

The heightened security steps reflect the rising number of threats against federal judges throughout the country. They also come as leaders of the federal judiciary ask Congress for help ramping up court protection after the attack this summer on the family of New Jersey District Judge Esther Salas. Her 20-year-old son was killed and her husband was critically wounded at their home by an embittered self-proclaimed “anti-feminist” who had filed a case before the judge.

Read

Synopsis

November 2020       Critical Reflections on Hamiltonian Perspectives on Rule‐Making and
Legislative Proposal Initiatives by the Chief Executive

October 2020            Should We Defend the Administrative State?

September 2020       Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

August 2020             Policy Making in the Shadow of Executive Action

With the pending introduction of vaccines the movement back to “normalcy” is an ambiguous adventure.

Once the genie has been let out of the bottle it will be difficult to return it in total. Already we read of, for example, any number of professional firms who have decided to reduce the size of their overhead by having the majority of their employees continue to work at home as expressed by the preferences of both management and the employees.

To those involved in knitting socks at home there is much to support the continuance of a virtual workplace.  However it is doubtful whether the virtual workplace is conducive to teaching new employees the substance of a firms’ services and products.