As part of my prep for this year’s ABA Administrative Law Conference, I put together a list of the regulatory policy documents that have been issued since the start of President Trump’s second term. Looking over these documents, a few themes emerge. First, the assertion of executive power. You can see this in assertions that […]

Many of Trump’s personnel choices have been front page news (…) but you have not seen many headlines about the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Long considered a very important policy official, OIRA Administrator nominations have started slipping to the back burner. Here’s an update with some new context that […]

This is a quick post to share some easy-to-read explainers about what different agency heads and civil servants do, how the civil service works, and Trump’s early and antagonistic actions towards our civil service system. Sometimes the government can seem like a black box. My view is that as you hear about early actions of […]

Today the D.C. Circuit held that the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) lacks statutory authority to issue rules under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). In Marin Audubon Society v. Federal Aviation Authority, the court declined to consider arguments about whether FAA complied with CEQ’s NEPA rules because it found those rules to be ultra […]

As part of my prep for this year’s ABA Administrative Law Conference, I put a list together of policy documents that have been issued by the Biden Administration as part or (or related to) efforts to modernize regulatory review. While much of the discussion about the Biden Administration’s regulatory approach has focused on, e.g., changes […]

Big news for regulatory policy today as the Biden-Harris administration rolls out several documents that make significant changes to regulatory policy. The main documents are an Executive Order on Modernizing Regulatory Review, a draft of potential revisions to Circular A-4, and a draft of potential revisions to Circular A-94. OIRA Administrator Ricky Revesz penned a […]

Back in February 2021, in the early days of the Biden Administration, I wrote about when we might expect to see a nominee for the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The conventional wisdom is that Cabinet heads go first and then the administration works its way down the hierarchy filling […]

I’m tagging in on the apportionments beat for a quick update. Prof. Matt Lawrence’s post explained that the 2022 Consolidated Apportionments Act required the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to disclose materials related to apportionment decisions. (If “apportionments” is a word whose meaning escapes you, check out the instant-classic 2016 Yale Law Journal article by Prof. […]