Richard Revesz practically turned out the lights for the Biden administration. At 11:30 a.m. on January 20, 2025—a half-hour before President Donald Trump took his oath of office—Revesz was in the White House's Roosevelt Room returning his IT equipment, as he finished up his job as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Looking down a hallway, he could see that the Oval Office was completely empty, ready for the trappings of its new occupant to be moved in.
Revesz, dean emeritus and AnBryce Professor of Law, spent two years in his OIRA role—for which his scholarly work was essential preparation. OIRA’s essential purpose is to delve deeply into the weeds of administrative law and to engage in rigorous cost-benefit analysis, a key tool in agency rulemaking. These are fields Revesz knows well. Long a leading scholar of administrative and environmental law, he also founded NYU Law’s Institute on Policy Integrity, which aims to improve governmental decision-making. Cost-benefit analysis is a significant focus of IPI’s research and advocacy, and Revesz has coauthored two books on the topic.
On the morning of January 22, less than 48 hours after walking out of the White House, Revesz was back in his office at the Law School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985. The ensuing weeks have been bittersweet. On day one of his second term, President Trump began his attempts to dismantle President Biden’s legacy, including targeting some of Revesz’s key initiatives at OIRA. Revesz hopes that steps that he and agencies took during his tenure will, at least to some extent, forestall such efforts. After leaving Washington, DC, he says, he was glad to head back to Washington Square, although he isn’t teaching this semester. “I thought it would be great to come here and be part of a community that I’m comfortable with, where I know people and felt welcome,” Revesz says.
We spoke to Revesz about his time in the Biden administration and issues involving the administrative state.
Explaining OIRA
Most Americans are likely not aware of the existence of OIRA—part of the White House's Office of Management and Budget—much less what it does. As Revesz explains, OIRA’s function is “to ensure that, before they see the light of day, regulations are properly grounded in science and economics and that they’ve been properly vetted across the whole executive branch to make sure that the government doesn’t work across purposes.” Created in 1980, OIRA has grown in importance. With Congress largely paralyzed by political polarization and the requirement of 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, “most domestic policy these days is done by regulation,” Revesz notes. As head of OIRA, Revesz oversaw a team of 10 political appointees and 50 career staffers.
Arriving with a plan of action
Taking the helm of OIRA in January 2023, at the halfway point of Biden’s presidency, Revesz arrived with a plan of action. “I think it’s actually really important if you go into one of these jobs to have a very clear idea of what do you think is important to accomplish,” Revesz says. “That’s especially true if you’re not starting the beginning of presidential term, which means that your time might be limited. Otherwise, you get sucked into the daily problems, the emails, the calls—you know, minor emergencies that arise—and then that becomes your job.” Revesz had three goals, all of which he says he accomplished.
Goal No. 1: Move fast
“My job,” says Revesz, “was to promote the regulatory priorities of the Biden administration and to make them as durable as possible.” From his scholarship, he knew that goal required moving quickly, in the event of a Republican administration reoccupying the White House in 2025. In a pair of law journal articles published in 2019 and 2022, Revesz and Bethany Davis Noll (an adjunct professor at the Law School and executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center) outlined ways in which regulations implemented by a president during the second half of his term in office were particularly vulnerable to rollback by a successor of the opposite party. And they noted that broad-scale rollbacks in such situations had become the norm. One-term presidents in particular, they wrote, would be “unlikely to see a significant portion of their regulatory output on important matters survive.”
What’s more, their research showed, going back to the Clinton administration, every president had enacted a disproportionate share of his last-year’s regulations during his final three months in office. That left many of those regulations vulnerable to negation via the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress an expedited path to overturn recent agency actions.
“We changed that radically,” says Revesz. “A disproportionate share of our last-year regulations were done in the first four months, through the end of April [2024].” In addition to protecting the rules from the Congressional Review Act, this also gave the Biden administration a chance to defend some regulations that were challenged in court through at least the initial steps of litigation.
“This was a big change that never happened in any prior administration,” Revesz says.
Goal No. 2: Update a key guidance document
Revesz thought that a longstanding tool of administrative law was badly in need of an update. “There is this very obscure thing called Circular A-4,” he says, “which is a guidance document on how agencies are supposed to assess the benefits and costs of regulation.” Last revised in 2003, the circular had become “obsolete in ways that had pretty strong anti-regulatory consequences,” he says.
Circular A-4’s guidance on the discount rate was of particular concern. Revesz explains: “There are a lot of regulations, especially environmental regulations, involving costs that are borne in the near term—a company buys pollution-control equipment—but then the benefits accrue over a long time. As this equipment is used over many years, there are going to be lower emissions, and fewer people will have respiratory problems or die of cancer or heart attacks. So when you compare the near-term costs with the benefits that happen in the long term, you need to use a discount rate to give those future benefits a present value.” The discount rate guidance in the original circular, Revesz said, was based on out-of-date economic analysis and market data, and generally needed to be lower—giving future benefits more value in today’s dollars, and thus making a stronger case for regulation.
Updating the circular involved multiple steps and stakeholders, but Revesz shepherded that process to completion in November 2023.
Goal No. 3: Establish the social cost of greenhouse gases
How much damage does one ton of carbon dioxide emissions cause? Coming up with a “social cost of carbon”—a dollar value for the harm it causes to such things as human health and agricultural productivity—is a critical metric for regulators evaluating the potential effects of policies that will reduce or increase greenhouse gas emissions. During his time at OIRA, Revesz oversaw an interagency process that came up with a number for this cost that was adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency and followed by several other agencies.
The administrative state under siege
These are challenging times for the administrative state. During Revesz’s tenure at OIRA, the Supreme Court issued several rulings that may significantly weaken agencies’ power, most prominently the Loper Bright decision. But for all the attention drawn by that case—which overruled a previous case that accorded significant leeway to regulators to interpret statutes— Revesz says he doesn’t see it as the most significant recent constraint on agency action.
“I saw a number of other things that make it more challenging for regulations to go out into the world in in terms of their durability,” he says. One is the Court’s embrace in 2022 of the major questions doctrine, which precludes agencies from resolving questions on significant issues without clear statutory authorization. Another is “very aggressive efforts by state attorneys general to litigate challenges to any regulation of significance,” which he notes is a relatively recent trend. Compounding the latter concern, Revesz says, is forum shopping by state AGs who file their suits challenging regulations in jurisdictions where they can have a high degree of confidence that the case will land before a judge who supports their goal.
Then there’s the Trump administration, with its openly stated hostility toward the administrative state. In January, Trump issued executive orders disavowing the use of the social cost of carbon and calling for revocation of the updates to Circular A-4. Revesz highlighted these moves in a February 17 opinion piece in the New York Times, describing them as among the “more subtle approaches” the administration is using “to upend the workings of the federal government.” And, in a February 27 opinion piece in Bloomberg Law, he took issue with the Trump administration’s policies seeking to dismantle environmental justice initiatives, calling them “irrational and inconsistent with established legal requirements.”
“Elections matter and have consequences,” Revesz says. Nonetheless, he adds, “there are constraints—the law has constraints—and there are analytical requirements of how things should be done. The courts have been clear that regulations—including those repealing existing rules—need to have robust explanations and that they need to be supported by science and economics. The administration could disregard that, but the enforcement mechanism is challenges in the courts—and if the courts do their job, those efforts will be struck down.”
Posted February 28, 2025