OIRA@2050

Editor’s Note: For information on the origins of OMB review of independent agency regulatory actions, see the 1987 National Journal article here.

From: The Salt Lake Tribune

By Cass Sunstein Bloomberg View

Last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down a federal regulation on mercury and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants is a temporary setback for those who seek to reduce air pollution. At the same time, however, it should be welcomed as a ringing endorsement of cost- benefit analysis by government agencies. It’s a kind of rifle shot, with potentially major effects on a host of future regulations that have nothing to do with the environment. (Disclosure: As administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012, I worked on the regulation that the court invalidated.)

Editor’s Note: Information on OIRA’s estimate of the Social Cost of Carbon is available here. A cost-effective climate change policy option is available here.

From: GlobeSt.com

By Erika Morphy

WASHINGTON, DC—Shortly before Washington DC officialdom departed for the July 4th weekend, the Office of Management and Budget announced it would be requiring federal agencies to consider the effects of climate change on the construction and maintenance budgets for federal facilities in fiscal year 2017.

It is a first for the agency.

The news was released in a blog post by Ali Zaidi, OMB’s associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science.

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a Comment by Ryan Bubb, Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, found in the current issue of Law & Contemporary Problems (Duke Law School). The issue is devoted to The Administrative Law of Financial Regulation. The current issue’s Table of Contents is found here. The complete Comment is found here.

Editor’s Note: For more information on how voluntary consensus and market-driven consortia standards are integrated into federal regulations, see here.

From: ANSI

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Southern African Trade Hub to carry out the “U.S.-Southern African Development Community Exchange on Good Regulatory Practice (GRP).” An activity of the ANSI-USAID Standards Alliance, the exchange took place June 1-2, 2015, in Johannesburg, South Africa .

Editor’s Note: Draft revised Circular A-130 emphasis the centrality of the Information Quality Act in all federal information collection and dissemination activities. For example, the revised draft document’s Basic Considerations and Assumptions state,

l. Information quality is a key parameter of information utility. The rigor of information collection design should be consistent with the likely use of the information. Quality standards provide established means to evaluate rigor.

m. Federal Government collection and dissemination of information must be done pursuant to applicable statutory requirements and conform to information quality standards established by the Federal Government. These standards include, among others, statistical directives, policy guidelines, and best practices. The degree to which the information collection must conform to Federal standards should be consistent with the likely use of the information.

From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation

Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider

Mandated disclosure reigns triumphant. Disclosure requirements appear everywhere: tort law (“duty to warn”); consumer protection (“truth in lending”); bioethics and health care (“informed consent”); online contracting (“opportunity to read”); food law (“nutrition data”); campaign finance regulation; privacy protection; insurance regulation; and more. Corporate scandals and financial crises ceaselessly spawn new disclosure laws: the Securities Act of 1933; the Truth-in-Lending laws of the 1960s and 1970s; the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

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From: Mercatus Center

Richard Williams, James Broughel

Federal agencies issue guidance documents that typically consist of sets of instructions or announcements written to inform regulated parties how to stay in compliance with the law. Owing to a confusing set of events, it is unclear whether these documents are receiving executive branch oversight from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). In the case of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), hundreds of guidance documents appear on its website, yet there is almost no evidence of oversight from OIRA.

From: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

he following remarks are from “Science and Federal Regulation: Is the Office of Management and Budget an Effective Gatekeeper?” a program held on May 19 in Washington, D.C. as part of the Washington Legal Foundation’s Media Briefing Series. The panel was moderated by Hon. Douglas H. Ginsburg, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The panelists are: Paul Noe, vice president, Public Policy, with the American Forest & Paper Association and former counselor to the administrator of OIRA; Nikesh Jindal, counsel, King & Spalding and former associate general counsel at OMB; and Lawrence A. Kogan, managing principal of The Kogan Law Group and chief executive of the nonprofit Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development. This has been edited for length and style. A video of the full program can be found at the Washington Legal Foundation (at www.wlf.org/communicating/mediabriefing_detail.asp?id=268).

From: BNA Daily Report for Executives

By Cheryl Bolen

The Administrative Conference of the U.S. (ACUS) adopted a set of recommendations to promote greater accuracy and transparency in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, including one debated at length to publish a previously undisclosed category of “pending” regulations.

“The primary effect of having a pending category is that the number of entries in the unified agenda is now 650 fewer than it has been for the average of the previous 20 years,” said Curtis Copeland, a consultant to the project and former specialist in American government at the Congressional Research Service. “So it basically is a way to suppress the number of entries in the published agenda,” he said.

Editor’s Note: For more information on the value of using voluntary consensus and consortia information systems standards as the basis for international harmonization, see here.

From: FCW | Comment

By Karen S. Evans

The role of federal CIOs includes a multitude of critical responsibilities—compliance, procurement, records management, privacy and security, as well as bringing mission-supporting technology to the workforce and citizens they serve. To deliver on these core obligations, CIOs must ensure that the services they manage are accessible to all, including users with disabilities.

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