The Obama White House changed rules to in response to industry lobbyists 76 percent of the time, while Bush changed them just 64 percent of the time. For environmental rules the record is even worse with an 84 percent change toward softening or eliminating environmental protections. According to a report produced by the Center for Progressive Reforms the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, headed by Administrator Cass Sunstein “…has pursued an “all you can meet” policy that industry and other special interests are eagerly exploiting. As a result, special interest representatives’ meetings with OIRA’s economists and White House political appointees vastly outnumber OIRA’s meetings with public interest organizations.”
The report analyzed over 1,000 meetings over a ten year period available on a searchable database and concluded the following
The meetings with special interests are remarkable for several reasons. The statutes under which the agencies regulate delegate authority not to the White House, and certainly not to OIRA, but to the departments and agencies themselves, because that is where the substantive expertise resides. OIRA imposes cost-benefit requirements on the agencies, often in contradiction of those same laws, but does not restrict its review of proposed regulations to that analysis. Instead it frequently substitutes its judgment about the substance of regulations for the judgment of the agencies themselves, almost invariably with the result of diluting regulatory safeguards. And OIRA forms that judgment after holding court for special interests, all of which have already had ample opportunity to participate in public-comment periods during the agencies’ development of regulations. According to the report:
Industry dominates the OIRA meetings process. OIRA makes no effort to balance its meeting schedule by hearing from even a rough equivalence of organizations supporting protective regulations. In the 10 years studied in the report, OIRA hosted 1,080 meetings, with 5,759 appearances by outside participants. Sixty-five percent of the participants represented regulated industry interests; 12 percent of participants appeared on behalf of public interest groups.
OIRA meetings correlate with changes to rules. Rules that were the subject of meetings were 29 percent more likely to be changed than those that were not. OIRA does not disclose its changes, but the evidence is that OIRA functions as a one-way ratchet, exclusively weakening agency rules.
The EPA is OIRA’s favorite punching bag. While EPA rules made up only 11 percent of all reviews by OIRA, 41 percent of all OIRA meetings targeted EPA rules. EPA rules were changed at a significantly higher rate—84 percent—than those of other agencies—65 percent—over the whole ten-year period.
OIRA routinely misses deadlines, stalling public health and safety protections. By executive order, OIRA has 90 days to review a rule, plus a possible 30-day extension. Of the 501 completed reviews in which outside parties lobbied OIRA, 59 (12 percent) lasted longer than 120 days.
OIRA ignores public disclosure requirements. OIRA is required by the same executive order to make available “all documents exchanged between OIRA and the agency during the review by OIRA,” and agencies are required to “identify for the public those changes in the regulatory action that were made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA.” Such requirements are routinely ignored.In preparing the report, CPR researchers compiled a comprehensive database of OIRA’s meetings with outside groups over the past 10 years. That database is online and available for searching.
The Guardian has a write up here.
People who have spent their careers in this field are not surprised to learn that the Obama White House is changing more draft rules than the Bush White House did.
John Graham ran the regulatory oversight office under George W. Bush. In his experience, Republican presidents tend to put people who don’t like new rules in charge of agencies — so those agencies don’t send a lot of regulations to a Republican-led White House for review.
In fact, “we had to devise an entirely new device called the prompt letter,” Graham recalls. “It says, ‘You really ought to strengthen the food label by putting the trans-fat content of foods on the label.’ But I think what you’ll find in the Obama administration is that there are no shortages of ideas of new regulations to be adopted coming out of the agencies.”
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/28/142721675/obama-office-alters-more-federal-rules-than-bush
Sometimes things are not what they appear to be at first blush.
Study Flawed
In Republican administrations, agency heads would be less likely to submit additional rules at all.
“In Democratic administrations, the rules that come to OMB are more anti-business in their drafting,” Graham said in an interview. “They will have more work to do in a Democratic administration.”
Graham criticized the report for assuming the administration’s changes made the regulations less costly.
“They are operating from an assumption which is not validated,” said Graham, now the dean of the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington, Indiana. “You don’t know from that study which way the changes are going.”
Obama’s White House has approved fewer regulations than Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father, Bloomberg News reported Oct. 25, citing a review of government data over the past 30 years.
The average annual cost of regulations to businesses under Obama is higher than under his predecessors, the Bloomberg review found.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-02/obama-weakened-regulations-at-greater-rate-than-bush-study-says.html