The Inside Story of OMB
How the President’s Swiss Army Knife Wields Power
Rob Fairweather has somewhat of a unique background.
He spent almost his entire government career at OMB. He started his 42 years at OMB as an examiner in the Environmental Branch, then moved to the Chief of the Environmental Branch, Deputy Associate Director of the Natural Resources Division, Deputy Associate Director of the International Affairs Division and ultimately the acting Director of OMB. I had the good fortune of hiring him after he graduated from Princeton and Stanford Business School.
Rob has just published a book titled “The Inside Story of OMB”. It is definitely an inside story. The book lives up to its title, “The Inside Story” because it does not dwell on generic public policy issues but instead the nuts and bolts of the decision process in OMB. The text describes in detail the analytical process used in OMB which determines the level of a request to be included in the President’s Budget. The text is very detailed, including the process used by a budget examiner to make a recommendation to a sequence of officials in OMB. The text even includes the process used by OMB to address agency reactions to the OMB proposal.
There is an interesting chapter devoted to how a detailed knowledge of the budget process can be used to improve elements in the regulatory and legislative processes. This chapter provides a real-world example by tying it to decision-making with regard to the Superfund program. The very wide reach of the Superfund program is discussed in detail and demonstrates the benefits of addressing the totality of the linkages of a particular program to others in its family. The book has fifteen chapters, and several are dedicated to specific programs such as Superfund, the Clean Air Act, and the Farm Bill.
There are several chapters which are of particular interest to those who participated in the advancement of regulatory review so it would be on par with budget review—a landmark occurrence.
Chapter Three: Becoming a Skeptic—The Education of an OMB Examiner
Chapter Ten: Balancing Costs and Benefits—Presidential Review EO’s
Chapter 11: The Long and Winding Road—The Never-ending Quest for Efficient
Federal Management
Chapter Ten in particular, provides a clear description of the evolution of regulatory review in OMB. What makes it unique is that it is from the pen of a career person who had not been employed by OIRA, the regulatory side of OMB.
On page 219 of the text the author gives a detailed and extremely unique description of the linkage between Executive Orders dealing with regulations and the Paperwork Reduction Act. Not only is it a clear description of the aforementioned linkage and provides not only an understandable description of OIRA’s lifeline to its very existence –review of regulations– but at the same time it demonstrates OIRA’s honoring of Congressional intent for Congress to make delegations of authority directly to agencies.
Chapter 11 is of particular interest because one can clearly compare the strength of the review processes used to review budget requests and proposed regulations with the strength of the tools used to improve the management of the federal government.
Fairweather gives an extremely lucid description of the wide range of mechanisms used by different Administrations to improve the management of the federal government. Nonetheless, few if any have the staying power of the processes used by the desk officers in OIRA and the budget examiners in OMB.
Consideration should be given to applying some of the tools used on both the “budget side” and OIRA to management issues. In a like manner OIRA could benefit from increasing the breadth of its product line to something broader than the review of proposed regulations. It must be noted that OIRA’s staff level has been reduced some fifty percent from its inception by a number of OMB Directors. The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness has addressed these issues in a post titled “CRE Public Policy Projects” contained in the publication titled “CRE High Priority Projects”.
Fairweather’s book provides the background and mechanisms to improve both the regulatory process and management processes utilized by federal agencies.
