Regulatory Transactions

From: American Action Forum

By Sam Batkins

From: Land Line

From: Bloomberg/BNA

By Sean Forbes

The Department of Labor sent its long-sought, long-fought fiduciary rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review, putting the financial industry one step away from dealing with new requirements aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in the provision of retirement investment advice.

The final rule was received by the OMB on Jan. 28, according to a posting on that agency’s site. A rule review by the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is generally limited to 90 days, though the OMB director can extend it once for up to 30 days and the head of a rulemaking agency can extend it indefinitely. With three months for review, the final rule could be sent back to the DOL by the end of April, although it might be released even sooner.

See Regulatory Budget Act of 1979

Here are some of the major players  behind a regulatory budget.

Here is one of the major reasons for implementing a regulatory budget.

(forthcoming)

Here is what you can do to help.

Here is the mechanism for getting the discussion moving    S 51.

From: Forbes | Opinion

Susan E. Dudley, Contributor

The Environmental Protection Agency is going through the motions of responding to a Supreme Court order requiring it to consider whether a $9.6 billion annual increase in Americans’ electric bills is “appropriate and necessary” to reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants. In a perfunctory 18-page notice, EPA proposes to conclude that even after considering costs, its regulations of electric generating units should stand. EPA reaches this conclusion by narrowly defining costs, making generous assumptions about the country’s ability to bear those costs and diverting attention away from the small risk reductions expected.

From: Genetic Literacy Project

Henry Miller & John Cohrssen

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The Obama administration recently announced an ambitious White House initiative to update the 30-year-old Coordinated Framework for the regulation of Biotechnology. (Disclosure: the coauthor of this article, John Cohrssen, was legal counsel to the White House working group that developed and implemented the 1986 Coordinated Framework.) The White House has directed the three regulatory agencies with biotechnology oversight — the EPA, FDA, and USDA — to update the Framework and develop a long-term strategy to ensure that the regulatory system is prepared for the future products of biotechnology, using a newly commissioned expert analysis of the biotechnology landscape.

From: Politico

The calendar says there are 13 months left to Barack Obama’s presidency. But when it comes to exercising executive power, it’s more like five.

By Timothy Noah

Nearly 4,000 regulations are squirming their way through the federal bureaucracy in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency — many costing industry more than $100 million — in a mad dash by the White House to push through government actions affecting everything from furnaces to gun sales to Guantánamo.

From: RegBlog

James Rathz

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Last month, President Obama signed into law the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, also known as the SPACE Act. The law is designed to foster growth in the nascent commercial space industry in areas such as mining and tourism, as well as streamline space regulations.

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Other provisions of the SPACE Act are aimed at creating a better framework for regulating satellites. One section requires several agencies, including NASA and the Department of Transportation, to work together to study the satellite traffic control system and develop recommendations for Congress on improving the system. A different section would require the Secretary of Commerce to report on the types of commercial satellites that they license and recommend statutory changes to improve the licensing system.

Editor’s Note: For more information on TPP and regulation, see here.

From: Good Fruit Grower

Eliminating tariff rates on tree fruit is a trade policy objective of the Northwest Horticultural Council. TPP furthers this objective.

by Mark Powers, Executive Vice President of the Northwest Horticultural Council

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In addition to the United States, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. These 12 countries represent 40 percent of the global economy.

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