NYU Law’s Dean Emeritus and AnBryce Professor of Law Richard Revesz will assume the role of administrator of the US Office for Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), starting in January 2023. Revesz was nominated for the position by President Joe Biden on September 2 and was confirmed by the US Senate on December 21 by a unanimous voice vote.
OIRA, housed within the Executive Office of the President, reviews rules drafted by federal agencies and oversees the implementation of rules and regulations across the federal government. Revesz is the second member of the NYU Law community to be the OIRA administrator; Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence Sally Katzen served in that position from 1993 to 1998.
“Our nation is fortunate to have a scholar and administrator of Ricky’s caliber to take charge of this critical administrative office,” says Dean Troy McKenzie. “While his talents as an educator will be sorely missed at the Law School, we take pride in his appointment and look forward to his return to our community with the wealth of experience he gains as head of OIRA.”
A leading authority on environmental and regulatory law and policy, Revesz has written 10 books and around 80 articles on environmental law and regulatory policymaking, including works on topics ranging from climate change to institutional contexts in administrative rulemaking. His most recent book, Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health (2020), co-authored with Michael Livermore ’06, argues for the importance of rigorous cost-benefit analysis in effective policy making, which they suggest had been lacking during the Trump Administration. Revesz and Livermore’s previous collaboration, Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (2008), asserts that progressive groups, which had traditionally eschewed the notion of cost-benefit analysis in federal regulation, had ceded the field to industry groups. That lack of participation, the book suggests, created an imbalance in political participation with repercussions for environmental, health, and safety protections.
Revesz has served since 2008 as director of NYU Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank seeking to improve governmental decision-making through scholarly research in economics, law, and regulatory policy, with a primary focus on climate and energy policy. Since 2014 (and until taking office as the OIRA Administrator), he has also served as the director of the American Law Institute, which works to clarify and improve US law. Revesz is a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former member of a panel on cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation within the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. He was NYU Law’s dean from 2002 to 2013.
Revesz will be on public service leave from the Law School and from the Institute for Policy Integrity while at OIRA.
Posted December 29, 2022