OIRA@2050

From: The Washington Post via Stars & Stripes

By John J. DiIulio Jr. and Paul R. Verkuil

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Seventh, there is no evidence that outsourcing federal administrative work saves money. For instance, a 2011 study by the Project on Government Oversight estimated that the contractors were paid roughly twice as much as federal workers would have been paid for the same work.

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So here’s hoping that the next debates, town halls and interviews reveal which, if any, candidates for chief executive understand that the federal government became outsized as it became more outsourced — and that, by every measure, today’s full-time federal workforce is overloaded, not bloated.

From: Bloomberg View via Financial Advisor

Cass R. Sunstein

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Is Warren right to call regulatory capture a “big deal”? In some contexts, she probably is. (Financial regulation, her primary concern, may well be an example.) But overall, the research offers a mixed verdict , and a look at what agencies have actually done raises the possibility that the problem is overstated. As of this writing, the Obama administration has issued 3,825 significant rules.¹ Of these, no less than 833 are “economically significant,” meaning that they have had an economic impact of more than $100 million per year. How does that fit with the claim that regulators have been captured by regulated industries? Would captured agencies really issue hundreds of significant regulations per year, imposing billions of dollars in annual regulatory costs?

From: Council on Foreign Relations

The Case for U.S. Economic Leadership: A Conversation with Jacob J. Lew

From: Forbes

Last week a group of libertarian and conservative groups issued a coalition letter calling on Congress to cap regulatory costs.

While some of us have long advocated experimenting with a regulatory budget (albeit not at the expense of not reducing government itself, nor of continuing to tolerate Congress’ over-delegation to agencies), the impetus for our letter was the new House Budget Resolution for fiscal year 2017‘s “Policy on Federal Regulatory Budgeting and Reform.”

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From: National Affairs | 27 National Affairs 42 (Spring 2016)

JEFF ROSEN

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There are many ongoing debates about regulation in the United States, and there are competing views about how much regulation is beneficial and worthwhile. But there is no dispute that the regulatory system is costly and has an effect on virtually every American. In a democracy like ours, who decides how much regulatory cost is “enough” or “the right amount”? Right now, the answer is that the federal agencies themselves decide, and very little has ever been done about this state of affairs. Since at least the 1940s, there have been efforts to require agencies to follow procedures dictating how they develop rules, but none to put limits on the costs they can impose.

Editor’s Note: See A Website Dedicated to the Implementation of a Regulatory Budget.

From: Competitive Enterprise Institute

Dear Members of Congress,

On behalf of the undersigned organizations and our members, we call on Congress to implement a regulatory budget to address the cost of federal regulations, which frequently have an effect similar to tax increases. Like federal spending, regulations and their costs should be capped, tracked and disclosed annually.

From: The Hill

By Lydia Wheeler

Federal agencies are skirting their legal reporting requirements, according to a new report from the conservative American Action Forum (AAF), which found that 955 rules weren’t sent to the Government Accountability Office in 2014 and roughly 1,069 weren’t reported in 2015.

Under the Congressional Review Act, federal agencies are required to submit a report to Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with a copy of the rule, a statement about whether the rule carries an economic impact of $100 million or more and the rule’s effective date.

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From: The Hill

By Lydia Wheeler

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The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE), a watchdog group funded by the business community, says Lee’s bill is the only regulatory reform bill it plans to actively promote.

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“We’d rather spend our limited time and resources on a mechanism that will control the size of the regulatory state as opposed to slowing it down,” he said.

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Editor’s Note: Originally posted on OIRA Watch here.

March 2016

It has been thirty six years since the first prototype regulatory budget was created during the Carter Administration; it has been nearly half a century since the concept of centralized regulatory review, a necessary condition for the implementation of a regulatory budget, was developed in the Johnson Administration.

Now is the time to launch the first initiative to implement explicit measures to control the size of the regulatory state.

More specifically  there has been an increased interest in implementing a regulatory budget including what we expect to be  the introduction of landmark legislation.

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the Peruvian newspaper Altavoz and is posted here as part of CRE’s continuing analysis of centralized regulatory review around the world. For more on the topic, see here and here. A translation from the original Spanish via Google is below. The Spanish original is found here.

From: Altavoz via Google Translate

INAER: A proposal for the next Congress by Gustavo Rodriguez Garcia

An agency revitalizing the economy.