A Symposium for AI Skeptics, AI Believers, and Everyone in Between
We promised you that this symposium would be for AI skeptics, AI believers, and everyone in between, and we hope that you will agree that we delivered.
Author: Bridget C.E. Dooling
Use Cases, Humans in the Loop, and Other Sleights of Hand, by Bridget C.E. Dooling
There are plenty of good use cases for AI in government decisionmaking, but sometimes we need to say no. It seems like it’s harder than it should be right now to say no. AI systems are truly remarkable but they are not capable of making values-laden policy decisions. We kid ourselves if we think that a “human in the loop” is more than an impoverished way to think about what agencies owe the public. We can likely make great progress in regulatory policy by letting algorithms into our loop, not the other way around.
Introduction to the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and the Administrative Procedure Act, by Bridget C.E. Dooling & Jordan Ascher
This symposium is for AI skeptics, AI believers, and everyone in between.
Trump Regulatory Policy: 2025 Compendium
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 […]
When Might President Trump Nominate an OIRA Administrator?
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 […]
Agency Heads, Civil Servants, and Trump
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 […]
D.C. Circuit Upends CEQ’s NEPA Rules
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 […]
Modernizing Regulatory Review – A Compendium (2024)
Last year, as part of my prep for the ABA Administrative Law Conference, I put together a list of policy documents that have been issued by the Biden Administration as part of (or related to) efforts to modernize regulatory review. I did this in part because a lot of this material is in different places and […]
Modernizing Regulatory Review: A Compendium
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 […]
Adding Public Engagement Upstream
*This post is part of a symposium on Modernizing Regulatory Review. For other posts in the series, click here. Public notice of regulatory proposals, with an opportunity for public comment, has long been part of the federal regulatory process in the U.S., and I hope it always will be. Public comments inform regulatory choices at agencies, […]
White House moves to modernize regulatory review
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 […]
Timeline for OIRA Nominees in New Administrations
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 […]
Introduction to Our Symposium on Jed Stiglitz’s “The Reasoning State”
*This is the introduction to a symposium on Jed Stiglitz’s “The Reasoning State.” For other posts in the series, click here. We’ve been on a roll with symposia here at the Notice & Comment Blog! Last week we wrapped a truly remarkable series of essays about Peter Shane’s Democracy’s Chief Executive, ably organized by Andrea Scoseria […]
Apportionments Revealed
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. […]
Call for Panel Proposals (by June 15): ABA Administrative Law Conference, Dec. 1-2, 2022
The ABA Section of Adminstrative Law and Regulatory Practice will host its annual administrative law conference on December 1-2, 2022. This is the Section’s signature event, and it attracts hundreds of government officials, scholars, and practitioners with two packed days of panels and programming. Following a survey of prior attendees, and as much as we […]