Howard Shelanski
cmonforton | March 17, 2016A funny thing happened this week when President Obama’s regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, was called to testify before Congress. The subject of the hearing: transparency at Shelanski’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). On the eve of the hearing, OIRA tried to fool us by pretending to be transparent.
For the last several months, I’ve been routinely checking OIRA’s website for notations about meetings the staff has held with individuals or organizations which have an interest in particular pending OSHA regulations. I knew meetings with particular groups had taken place, but…
lborkowski | February 17, 2016Cross-posted from CPRBlog
by James Goodwin
In case you didn’t get the memo: President Obama is entering the last year of his final term in office, so now we’re all supposed to be panicking over a dreaded phenomenon known as “midnight regulations.” According to legend, midnight rulemaking takes place when outgoing administrations rush out a bunch of regulations during their last few days in order to burnish their legacy or make concrete several of their policy priorities in ways that would be difficult for a successor—presumably from a different party—to undo. The legend further holds that…
cmonforton | March 4, 2015It’s a rare thing on Capitol Hill when a member of the Administration is on the hot seat from both sides of the aisle. But that’s what happened on Tuesday when President Obama’s regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, JD, PhD, testified at a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform.
The Republican Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and other subcommittee members, peppered him with questions about OIRA’s lack of transparency in numerous arenas. Their motivations were different, but they were equally tough in…