EO 12866
cmonforton | August 28, 2013President Obama's regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, has been on the job for a month. During his confirmation hearing Shelanski expressed his commitment to transparency. He suggested it was one of his key priorities within the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) which is housed within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As noted, however, by CPR scholar Sidney Shapiro and his colleague James Goodwin, OIRA has a long history of secrecy with respect to its role in the centralized review of agencies' regulatory activities. Many in the open-government…
cmonforton | June 12, 2013Themes related to time---meeting deadlines, doing retrospective reviews----were heard frequently today by President Obama's nominee to direct his Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Howard Shelanski, JD, PhD, the President's choice for his "regulatory czar" post, appeared for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs.
The nominee's written statement was short on details about his vision for OIRA, but in response to a question from Committee Chairman Tom Carper (D-DE), he mentioned three specific priorities:
"Should…
cmonforton | May 15, 2013Spring 2013 looked like it would be a banner season for progress by the Obama Administration on new worker safety regulations. In the Labor Department's most recent regulatory agenda, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) indicated they'd be taking key steps in March through June 2013 on rules to better protect workers from health and safety hazards. I thought these optimistic projections meant President Obama's second term would be a more productive one than his first. With the Presidential election behind them, the…
cmonforton | May 31, 2012The Obama Administration's quest to appease business interests' claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the civil rights, public health and workers' safety communities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Council of LaRaza, to the American Public Health Association and Nebraska Appleseed, the feedback is loud and clear: USDA should withdraw the regulatory changes it proposed in January (77 Fed Reg 4408) which would shift the responsibility for examining and sorting poultry carcasses with obvious defects from USDA inspectors to the…
cmonforton | May 18, 2012Members of and organizations affiliated with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) received an Action Alert today urging them to tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to withdraw his agency's proposed rule on poultry slaughter inspection (77 Fed Reg 4408.) As written here previously and by the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor in "The Age of Greed," the USDA proposal was developed in response to President Obama's edict about regulations, and his call to agencies to eliminate "outmoded" and "excessively burdensome" rules. The change proposed by USDA involves shifting the responsibility…
cmonforton | April 12, 2012More than 425 days----that's 14 months----have passed since the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not have a comprehensive, protective standard on the books to address it. In the last few decades, epidemiological studies have also found a strong association between silica exposure and…
cmonforton | March 12, 2012Making a $10,000 bet, insulting people for wearing plastic rain ponchos, and asserting that $374,000 is not much to earn in speaking fees are just a few examples of Mitt Romney being out of touch. The Republican Presidential hopeful doesn't seem to have a clue either about how federal agencies like EPA and OSHA conduct their work. On Romney's website, his issue brief on "Regulations" says:"A look across the landscape shows that federal agencies today have near plenary power to issue whatever regulations they see fit. Though most are nominally controlled by the president, in actual…
cmonforton | January 3, 2012When an organization fails to get the little things right, I have difficulty believing they are competent to get the big things right either. That's the way I feel about the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
OIRA is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was created by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, and is charged with reviewing certain proposed federal regulations and approving agencies' requests to collect data from the public. One of OIRA's responsibilities, as outlined in the 1993 Executive Order (EO) 12866, is coordinating the…
cmonforton | November 28, 2011A new report by the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) confirms what some of us have suspected: there's not much difference between the Obama Admininstration's and GW Bush Administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) when it comes to meetings with industry lobbyists and giving lip-service to transparency.
In "Behind Closed Doors at the White House," CPR offers a 10-year analysis of the 6,194 draft regulatory actions reviewed by OIRA, a step in the rulemaking process dictated by Executive Order (EO) 12866 for rules of particular significance. Their assessment examined…
cmonforton | November 25, 2011Before too long the US Department of Labor (DOL) and other federal agencies should be issuing their annual regulatory plans and semi-annual agendas. These documents serve as official public notice of agencies' regulatory (and deregulatory) priorities. The Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order (EO) 12866 direct agency heads to release these documents in April (agenda) and October (plan and agenda), but the Obama Administration doesn't have a good track record meeting those deadlines.
I'm not going to predict when the next agenda and plan will be issued or, as I did in the Spring, on…
cmonforton | October 4, 2010Ever since the Reagan Administration, the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has been reviewing rules proposed by federal agencies. These regulations might come from the Dept of Energy (DOE) on efficiency standards for home refrigerators, HHS rule on premarket safety report for drugs or devices, or the Dept of Transportation (DOT) on limiting the use of wireless devices by commercial drivers. Presidential Executive Order (EO) 12866, issued in 1993 by President Clinton, is the instrument that grants…