Public Participation

1. Jim Tozzi — A central architect of centralized White House regulatory review. His work at OMB helped build the institutional machinery that eventually became OIRA, and he later played an important role in the development of the Information Quality Act. His contribution is especially significant because it concerns the institutional architecture of regulatory oversight.
2. Christopher DeMuth — As OIRA Administrator under President Reagan, helped establish the newly created OIRA as an operating institution and implement the Reagan administration’s regulatory-review program.

Putting Social Security and Medicare on a gold standard is an interesting idea, but the key question is what “gold standard” means. If you mean requiring the programs to accumulate assets backed by gold, or tying benefits to the value of gold, it could protect beneficiaries against currency depreciation—but it would not by itself solve the programs’ underlying financing deficits.

Social Security is fundamentally a transfer system: payroll taxes collected from current workers finance current beneficiaries. Its OASI trust fund is now projected to be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032; thereafter, incoming dedicated revenue would initially cover about 78% of scheduled benefits. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance trust fund is projected to be depleted in 2033. These problems arise because promised expenditures exceed projected dedicated revenues—not because the trust funds are denominated in dollars rather than gold.