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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
*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, […]
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 […]
*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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Good opportunity for admin law, bureaucracy, regulation, health law, and FDA-regulated products practitioners & scholars (just to name a few!). The Food & Drug Law Journal is convening a symposium on FDA’s relationship with other domestic regulators. From the call: This Symposium will offer wide-ranging discussion, among scholars and practitioners, of the actual and the […]
For most federal agencies, centralized review by Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and regulatory impact analysis have been a routine part of the regulatory process for more than 40 years.[1] Not so in the tax context. When OIRA was in its infancy, OIRA Administrator Christopher DeMuth and Treasury Department General Counsel Peter Wallison […]
*This is the third post in a series on Andrew Rudalevige’s new book, By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power. For other posts in the series, click here. Perhaps because they bear the president’s signature and don’t require ratification, executive orders are considered to be entirely within the president’s control. But early in […]
Welcome to our second symposium of the month!* We close out October with a series of essays reacting to Prof. Andrew Rudalevige‘s By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton University Press 2021). If we know anything about executive orders, it’s that they’re actions that the president takes alone. But who […]