Books and Reports
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.
Regulators’ Budget Reflects President Trump’s Priorities
By Susan E. Dudley & Melinda Warren
This year's annual report finds that although President Trump has made reducing regulatory burdens a priority, he proposes to increase the regulators' budget in FY 2018. Some agencies are budgeted for significant increases in both expenditures and staff, while others face dramatic cuts. In addition, this report finds that while spending and staffing at federal agencies has generally increased over the 59-year period covered by this report, the focus of those resources and the rate of increase have varied with the perceptions of public policy issues and the philosophies of elected officials in the executive and legislative branches.
Regulation: A Primer (Korean edition)
Susan Dudley and Jerry Brito's book, "Regulation: A Primer" has been translated in Korean. This primer provides an accessible overview of regulatory theory, analysis, and practice. It examines the constitutional underpinnings of federal regulation and discusses who writes and enforces regulation and how they do it. It also provides insights into the different varieties of regulation and how to analyze whether a regulatory proposal makes citizens better or worse off.
Structured to Fail? Regulatory Performance under Competing Mandates
By Christopher Carrigan, Ph.D, Senior Scholar
Commentators often point to the structure of regulatory agencies charged with overseeing the associated industries in the wake of a national crisis, noting that the need to balance competing regulatory and non-regulatory missions undermined each agency's ability to be an effective regulator. Carrigan challenges this critique by employing a diverse set of research methods, including an in-depth case study of US regulatory oversight of offshore oil and gas development leading up to the Gulf oil spill, to systematically evaluate the benefits and concerns associated with either combining or separating regulatory and non-regulatory missions. His analysis shows why assigning competing non-regulatory missions to regulatory agencies can still be better than separating them in some cases.
One Standard to Rule Them All: The Disparate Impact of Energy Efficiency Regulations
Chapter by Sofie E. Miller and Brian F. Mannix
Federal regulations restrict the energy that everyday products can use, for everything from cars to microwaves. While these rules impose significant costs on consumers, the benefits are harder to identify. Agencies claim that restricting consumers’ choices provides consumers with large benefits, but this reasoning is hard to reconcile with the fact that consumers have many legitimate reasons to prefer the appliances they buy and the cars they drive. This chapter explores the reasoning behind energy efficiency regulations and why these reasons are insufficient to support the large costs they impose on consumers, especially low-income consumers.
The Final Countdown: Projecting Midnight Regulations
By Sofie E. Miller and Daniel R. Pérez
The final months of presidential administrations are accompanied by a significant increase in regulatory output as the executive branch relies increasingly on unilateral activity in a rush to implement its remaining policy priorities. This has come to be known as the “midnight period.” This report contains two robust, quantitative models that contribute to the scholarship in this area by: predicting the number of economically significant rules likely to be issued during the Obama administration’s final months, and finding that independent regulatory agencies do not increase their regulatory output during presidential transitions.
Regulators’ Budget from Eisenhower to Obama
By Susan E. Dudley & Melinda Warren
According to a new analysis from the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis, fiscal outlays for administering regulation have increased more than 20-fold since 1960. In the final year of the Eisenhower administration, regulatory agencies employed a little more than 57,000 people and spent $533 million (equivalent to $3 billion in 2009 dollars). President Obama’s final budget request to Congress proposes expenditures of $70.0 billion ($61 billion in 2009 dollars) on regulatory activities in FY 2017, and a staff of almost 279,000.
US-EU Regulatory Cooperation: Lessons and Opportunities
By D. Pérez, S. Dudley, N. Eisner, R. Lutter, D. Zorn and N. Nord
The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center prepared this report as part of a grant from the European Union to analyze regulatory cooperation between the EU and U.S. The report includes three case studies examining how cooperation has worked in practice between U.S. regulatory agencies and their EU counterparts and an analysis of U.S. regulations likely to have significant effects on international trade and investment. These analyses identify opportunities to reduce incompatible approaches while indicating areas where differences could persist due to issues of national sovereignty and structural differences between countries.
Managing Water in the West: Private and Public
By Randy T. Simmons
Who is in charge of water in the United States? The answer depends on where you live. In the West, a complex system of private owners, water companies, irrigation and municipal water districts, and federal agencies are able to allocate water in a relatively seamless manner. In collaboration with Utah State University's Institute of Political Economy, the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center presents Managing Water in the West: Private and Public, a new report that shows how private property rights and market conditions enable innovation and efficient allocation of clean water.
2016 Regulators' Budget: Increases Consistent with Growth in Fiscal Budget
By Susan E. Dudley, Director, & Melinda Warren
This report tracks the portion of the Budget of the United States devoted to developing and enforcing federal regulations from 1960 to 2016. It presents the President’s requested budget outlays in fiscal year (FY) 2016, as well as estimated outlays for FY 2015 as reported in the Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2016. This “regulators’ budget” reflects the on-budget costs of regulation. This report finds that the regulators’ budget is growing at approximately the same pace as the overall Budget, 5.3 percent in real terms in FY 2016 and 4.3 percent in FY 2015. The President’s proposed budget for the regulatory activities tracked here is $66.8 billion in FY 2016; estimated outlays in FY 2015 are $62.4 billion. The Budget also requests increases in federal regulatory agency personnel of 1.2 percent in FY 2016 and 0.2 percent in FY 2015. Staffing at regulatory agencies is expected to exceed 280,500 people in 2016.
The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Public Policy and Administration
Edited by Steven J. Balla, Martin Lodge, and Edward C. Page
This Handbook brings together a collection of leading international authors to reflect on the influence of central contributions, or classics, that have shaped the development of the field of public policy and administration. In this volume, the authors offer unique insights into the ways in which individual classics have been received in scholarly debates and disciplines, how classics have shaped evolving research agendas, and how the individual classics continue to shape contemporary scholarly debates.
Regulatory Studies Center
Columbian College of Arts & Sciences
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