A wide range of areas—including administrative procedures, environment and energy, nutrition benefits, immigration, and healthcare—experienced important regulatory developments during the past year.
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STB's Railroad Revenue Adequacy
The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 deregulated most freight rail rates but left the Interstate Commerce Commission (and now the STB) with responsibility for ensuring that rail rates are “just and reasonable” for shippers who lack good transportation alternatives to a single railroad.
Regulatory Impact Analysis and Litigation Risk
This paper explores the role that the regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) that agencies are required to prepare for important proposed rules play in decisions by courts about whether these rules should be upheld when they are challenged after promulgation.
Designing a Choice Architecture for Regulators
The emergence of behavioral public administration has led to increasing calls for public managers and policy makers to consider predictable cognitive biases when regulating individual behaviors or market transactions.
Regulatory Oversight and Benefit-Cost Analysis: A Historical Perspective
This article examines the evolution of executive regulatory oversight and analysis from the 1970s to today, exploring the reasons for its durability and whether the current imposition of a regulatory budget challenges the bipartisan nature of regulatory practice.
Regulatory Oversight and Benefit-Cost Analysis: A Historical Perspective
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Executive Office of the President coordinates the federal government’s regulatory agenda, reviews executive branch agencies’ draft regulations, and oversees government-wide information quality, peer review, privacy, and statistical policies.
STB's Rate Review and Market Dominance -- Reply Comment
In two related proceedings, the STB has proposed a streamlined approach to assessing whether a railroad has market dominance and a final offer process for small rate disputes.
Behavioral public administration (BPA) research aspires not only to draw on developments in behavioral science but also, importantly, to address central themes in public administration. By focusing a symposium on bureaucratic red tape, administrative burden, and regulation, we encouraged BPA scholarship to engage with fundamental public administration topics that are also relevant for the broader literature on organizations and management.
Better Economic Analysis Can Reduce Regulators’ Litigation Risks
Recent research sheds light on the relationship between the quality of an agency’s economic analysis and the risk that a regulation will be overturned in court.
OIRA’s Regulatory Reform Report for Fiscal Year 2019
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) released its annual Regulatory Reform Status Report on December 6, 2019. The report, which in the past has been published along with the Fall Unified Agenda, compiles executive branch agencies’ continued efforts to comply with Executive Order 13771.