The Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) released a report on December 18 with recommendations for the Obama administration on improving the regulatory review process. "Fixing Regulatory Review: Recommendations for the Next Administration" sets out 10 broad review principles and offers detailed suggestions on how President Bill Clinton's 1993 executive order concerning regulatory planning and review might be revised to improve the process.
The report's 10 regulatory review principles include better coordination among agencies, enhanced transparency, the maximization of net benefits, more stringent review of deregulation, and an end to the current practice of discounting a regulation's benefits for future generations. The recommendations are followed by a line-by-line markup of Clinton's executive order, allowing the reader to see precisely how the report's suggestions could be implemented by the new administration.
"Fixing Regulatory Review" is based partly on the book Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health by IPI faculty director Dean Richard Revesz and IPI executive director Michael A. Livermore '06, the coauthors of the report, as well as on recommendations from other groups and concepts generated at a roundtable of experts that convened at the Law School in November. Those experts included Rob Brenner, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Policy Analysis and Review; Sally Katzen, the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) former deputy director for management and former administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; Nancy Ketcham-Colwill of the EPA's Office of General Counsel; Vickie Patton '90, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the EPA's National Clean Air Act Advisory Committee; and NYU Law professors Richard Stewart and Katrina Wyman, among others. The final report, while making use of the roundtable's recommendations, does not necessarily reflect the specific views of the participants or their organizations.
Read "Fixing Regulatory Review: Recommendations for the Next Administration"