What's New from the GW Regulatory Studies Center
6/13/18 - Regulation Digest, Vol. 7, No. 24
6/12/18 - Public Interest Comment on The Food Safety and Inspection Service’s proposed rule: Egg Products Inspection Regulations, by Richard B. Belzer, Independent Consultant
6/11/18 - The Hill, US-Canada regulatory cooperation continues despite Trump’s G-7 outburst, by Daniel R. Pérez & Susan E. Dudley
6/6/18 - Regulation Digest, Vol. 7, No. 23
6/6/18 - U.S. and Canada Sign Agreement on Regulatory Cooperation, by Susan E. Dudley
5/30/18 - Regulation Digest, Vol. 7, No. 22
5/30/18 - A Taxonomy of Regulatory Forms, Regulatory Insight by Zhoudan Xie & Daniel R. Pérez
5/23/18 - Regulation Digest, Vol. 7, No. 21
5/21/18 - Forbes, Critics and Supporters Of EPA's Transparent Science Proposal: File Comments On It, But Read It First, by Susan E. Dudley
5/18/18 - Public Interest Comment on The Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Rule Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, by Susan E. Dudley
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New Commentaries from the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center
U.S. and Canada Sign Agreement on Regulatory Cooperation
Spring Unified Agenda Sustains Deregulatory Focus
GDPR: Does it matter on this side of the Atlantic?
Regulating Within a Budget
Reviewers and Revenooers Reach Compromise
Embracing Ossification: Trump and the Shifting Politics of Procedural Controls
Organizing Agencies to Promulgate Rules
OMB Report on Regulatory Costs & Benefits Leaves Room for Regulatory Reform
Quality, not Quantity, is Key to Effective Commenting
U.S. and Canada Sign Agreement on Regulatory Cooperation
6/06/18 - The Treasury Board of Canada and the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs signed a Memorandum of Understanding last week to continue collaborating on the Canada-United States Regulatory Cooperation Council. With the goal of reducing unnecessary differences between the two countries' regulatory framework, the MOU promotes a joint effort to create mutually beneficial economic outcomes, despite recent trade tariffs imposed on Canada by the U.S.
Spring Unified Agenda Sustains Deregulatory Focus
5/10/2018 - The Spring 2018 Unified Agenda includes a total of 3,352 regulatory actions, 234 of which are classified as regulatory, 611 as deregulatory, with the remainder exempt or classified as “other.” Of the total number of actions, 139 are economically significant. The Agenda distinguishes between active regulations (those with milestones within the next 12 months), long-term actions, and completed actions. Of the 2,226 actions listed as active approximately 24% are published for the first time in this Spring Agenda.
GDPR: Does it matter on this side of the Atlantic?
5/07/2018 - Europe's implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will compel companies and organizations to abide by new data collection requirements, and require certain firms to staff a Data Protection Officer tasked with monitoring data security and producing impact assessments. Further changes will require individuals to "opt-in" to all forms of data sharing, and require companies to report any data breaches within 72 hours. These changes will certainly impact U.S.
Regulating Within a Budget
4/23/18 - Despite his rhetoric on regulation, President Trump continues to require agencies to make decisions based on an understanding of regulatory benefits and costs. Although he has overlaid a budget constraint on these existing requirements, and his executive orders signal less emphasis on estimating regulatory benefits, this may not be all bad.
Reviewers and Revenooers Reach Compromise
4/16/18 - After weeks of negotiations, the Treasury Department and Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) agreed last week that IRS regulations would be subject to the same analytical requirements and interagency review as other agencies’ rules. Susan Dudley thinks the memorandum of agreement strikes the right balance between ensuring regulations are well-reasoned and cost-effective, while not inhibiting the issuance of timely guidance for taxpayers.
Embracing Ossification: Trump and the Shifting Politics of Procedural Controls
4/10/2018 - This article examines the effects of procedural requirements for both the implementation and repeal of agency rules. Cost-benefit analyses, judicial reviews, and other requirements in the rule-making process formalized by the Administrative Procedure Act and Information Quality Act have long been championed by opponents of regulatory accumulation as a means to slow the growth of regulations.
Organizing Agencies to Promulgate Rules
3/9/18 - Although federal law specifies procedures and requirements for agencies to consider public feedback in how they design their rules, the ways in which they plan for and develop these rules internally is largely a “black box” which is far less understood by this same public, or even scholars for that matter.
OMB Report on Regulatory Costs & Benefits Leaves Room for Regulatory Reform
2/26/2018 - On Friday, OMB released its Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations, which provides a window into the benefits and costs of 137 regulations issued between fiscal year 2007 and FY 2016. According to agency estimates, these 137 rules add up to $930.3 billion in annual benefits and $128.4 billion in annual costs. The rules included in this report are those issued by previous administrations, and as a result these totals don’t include the regulatory reforms implemented during the first year of the Trump administration.
Quality, not Quantity, is Key to Effective Commenting
2/20/18 - The deluge of comments on the recent Net Neutrality rule has raised concerns regarding public participation in rulemaking. Fake comments are presumed to threaten the democratic process and unfairly impact the outcomes. But a closer look at the regulatory process shows that the quality of comments is far more important than the quantity.
Research
Public Interest Comment on The U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Combusted Cigarettes
By David Zorn, Ph.D.
In a comment filed on the "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Combusted Cigarettes," Zorn observes that the FDA's plan to develop a maximum nicotine level for cigarettes is a novel and creative approach to promote public health. He also examines some drawbacks of the FDA's plan, including the speculative and unproven nature of the underlying hypothesis, as well as the limitations of removing access to only combustible sources of nicotine.
Public Interest Comment on The Food Safety and Inspection Service’s proposed rule: Egg Products Inspection Regulations
By Richard B. Belzer, Independent Consultant
This public interest comment provides an overview of the Food Safety Inspection Service’s (FSIS) proposed rule requiring official plants that process egg products to develop and implement Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Systems and Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures. FSIS would eliminate certain existing requirements, and add new labeling requirements. The comment reviews the justifications for the rulemaking change, and provides answers to how it would affect previous rules, industry growth, and foodborne illness rates.
A Taxonomy of Regulatory Forms
By: Zhoudan Xie & Daniel R. Pérez
This Regulatory Insight addresses the information gap in how regulations are measured when determining their effect on economic growth and other macroeconomic measures by developing a taxonomy of regulatory forms. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this framework allows regulations to be classified by the form they employ to achieve the stated regulatory outcomes. We expect this taxonomy to also be applicable to industries outside of agriculture, and to be utilized by researchers and analysts in a wide range of fields as a framework for informing research on the relative effectiveness of different regulatory forms to address market and social problems.
Public Interest Comment on The Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Rule Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science
By: Susan E. Dudley
The EPA’s “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” proposed rule seeks to improve the data and models that underlie the rulemaking process by making them publicly available for further analysis and validation. This public interest comment examines the merits of the proposed rule and how it relates to existing practices. These remarks conclude with a case for why clearer explanations of rulemaking rationale would encourage more openness and constructive discussion, ultimately improve policy decisions, and engender greater acceptance of policy choices.
FY 2019 Regulators' Budget: More for Homeland Security, Less for Environmental Regulation
By: Susan E. Dudley and Melinda Warren
This year's annual report finds that overall spending on regulatory agencies will be maintained at 2018 levels. The total request of $71 billion in regulatory outlays is a 0.1% increase year-to-year when adjusted for inflation. The report also finds that the number of regulators would fall slightly from 280,872 to 280,269 - a 0.2% reduction compared to 2018. Despite the small changes across agencies overall there are substantial changes within particular agencies. The Dept. of Homeland Security, Food & Drug Administration, and Housing & Urban Development will see 4.8%, 5%, and 11% increases in federal outlays, respectively. On the other hand, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will receive 10.4% less, and the Environmental Protection Agency will be spending 24.9% less than in 2018.
Public Comment on the EPA's Proposed Rule Repeal of Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units
By: Brian F. Mannix
The EPA has proposed to repeal the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions guidelines for electric generating units issued on October 23, 2015—better known as the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The Agency has also sought comment separately on what, if anything, ought to replace it. This comment, often drawing on earlier comments, will focus on the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) that supported EPA’s 2015 CPP final rule, and outlines those areas where the agency made major errors in the 2015 RIA, and where it could go further to improve the analysis.
Public Comment on OMB's 2017 Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations
By: Brian F. Mannix, Sofie E. Miller, & Susan E. Dudley
The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center improves regulatory policy through research, education, and outreach. As part of its mission, the GW Regulatory Studies Center conducts careful and independent analyses to assess rulemaking proposals from the perspective of the public interest. This comment on the Office of Management and Budget’s 2017 Draft Report to Congress offers suggestions for improving the information value of the Report, as well as the evidence on which regulatory policies depend, and does not represent the views of any particular affected party or special interest.
Where's the Spam? Mass Comment Campaigns in Agency Rulemaking
By: Steven J. Balla, Alexander R. Beck, William C. Cubbison, & Aryamala Prasad
This article examines the occurrence and nature of mass comment campaigns in rulemaking at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 2012 and 2016. The analysis demonstrates that campaigns of more duplicate or near-duplicate comments occur across issue areas under EPA jurisdictions, and that broad societal constituencies—such as environmentalists—are more active in sponsoring campaigns than specific interests negatively affected by stringent regulations. These findings in some respects confirm and in other respects challenge existing understandings of mass comment campaign participation in administrative rulemaking.
Organization, Process, and Agency Rulemaking
By Christopher Carrigan & Russell Mills
In this working paper, Christopher Carrigan and Russell Mills demonstrate how variation in the design of rulemaking procedures inside regulatory agencies affects the resulting rules. By employing a novel dataset tracking job functions of agency rule contacts for over 200 economically significant rules, the authors find that expanding the breadth of personnel types closely involved in a rulemaking reduces both the time it takes to promulgate the rule and the resulting detail with which it is presented. This work demonstrates how theories describing the implications of assigning team participants distinct roles in private organizations translate to government rulemaking.
Public Comment on Reforming DOE's "Process Rule" for Energy Efficiency Standards
By Sofie E. Miller
In response to the Department of Energy request for public comment on the proposed modifications to its "Process Rule," Sofie E. Miller filed recommendations regarding improvements to direct final rulemaking, retrospective review, and the analysis that supports the Department's rules.
Public Comment on EPA's Proposed Rule: State Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Electric Utility Generating Units
Brian Mannix filed a Public Interest Comment with EPA, recommending four features that the agency should incorporate into a possible replacement for the agency’s Clean Power Plan. First, the agency should set standards for CO2 intensity, rather than a mass-based cap on CO2 emissions. Second, the standards should be tiered by technology. Third, the agency should allow trading of CO2 credits, both within and across technology categories. Fourth, the agency should incorporate a safety valve mechanism that keeps the price of CO2 credits commensurate with the domestic social cost of carbon. Such a rule could function as a “last-ton tax,” with many of the economic efficiencies of a carbon tax, but without exceeding the boundaries of EPA’s regulatory authority.
Benefit-Cost Analysis and Emerging Technologies
By Brian F. Mannix
The Hastings Center has published “Benefit-Cost Analysis and Emerging Technologies,” by RSC’s Brian Mannix, as part of a special report funded by the National Science Foundation. The full report explores the governance of newly developed techniques in bioengineering – such as the ability to modify a species in the wild, or render it (a mosquito, for example) extinct. Mannix argues that, properly understood, benefit-cost analysis is an appropriate technique for determining which actions are in the public interest. He also cautions against a “precautionary” approach that would shift the burden onto new technologies to demonstrate safety before they can be used.
A Proposed Framework for Evidence-Based Regulation
By Marcus Peacock, Sofie E. Miller, & Daniel R. Pérez
Policymakers and scholars have given serious thought to how evidence-based approaches can improve policymaking, but using evidence to improve regulatory outcomes requires a separate framework than the one currently in use. This paper details how the regulatory process differs from other federal policymaking and establishes a framework for evidence-based regulation (EBR) to improve regulatory outcomes by planning for, collecting, and using evidence throughout the life a regulation. The authors discuss the main barriers that regulatory agencies face in implementing an EBR approach and advance concrete proposals for overcoming these barriers.
Book Review of Andrew W. Lo's "Review of Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought"
By Susan E. Dudley
What drives our responses to risk and uncertainty, and how can we improve them? In his 2017 book, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought, MIT Sloan finance professor Andrew Lo answers that question using evolutionary concepts and insights, including competition, innovation, reproduction, and adaptation.
International Regulatory Indexes at a Glance
By Zhoudan Xie
This Regulatory Insight provides an overview of how regulation is measured and compared across countries, compares the available measures, and examines where the U.S. stands relative to other countries. Internationally-comparable measures of regulation are mostly constructed through the composite index approach. This Insight reviews five international regulatory indexes measuring economic freedom, business/competition friendliness, and social regulation. The indexes differ significantly in terms of the coverage of regulation, methodologies and data. Even indexes measuring the same dimension of regulation can present different results, depending on the specific variables and data chosen.
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