Efforts by the Biden administration to hide expensive regulations and spin economy-choking rules as a win for liberals are coming under fire from experts urging the White House to not muck up decades of bias-free policies with politics.
At issue is how new regulations imposed by agencies are graded. For years, the goal has been transparency on costs and benefits, and over time, Republicans and Democrats have praised the process for keeping politics at bay.
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But critics argue that the Biden team is clouding the sunshine with changes that will hide the costliest of rules from congressional oversight and paint some as politically beneficial, a consideration previously considered improper and biased.
If they fail to put a brake on transformations now underway, policymakers will increasingly have their hands full in monitoring both a more slippery environment of significant rules, writes @wayne_crews @Forbes https://t.co/NIXE7Fk23T
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (@ceidotorg) August 28, 2023
Two proposed changes have been singled out by groups including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former presidents of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.
One would raise the price tag of regulations deemed to have a significant economic impact from $100 million to $200 million, and another would let regulators brag on the political benefits of new rules.
“If honesty doesn’t prevail, government can grow by means of more obscure guidance, memoranda and directives of various sorts, as well as spending alone,” CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews warned.
Another change would add societal and political benefits to how regulations are calculated, a big no-no in the past.
Commentary by fmr @SBCA presidents in today’s @WSJ: Some changes proposed in Draft Circular A-4 appear to embed political objectives in the regulatory review process — upending a longstanding bipartisan reliance on best practices & evidence. @OMBPresshttps://t.co/l3XtTkPKhH
— GW Regulatory Studies Center (@RegStudies) August 29, 2023
“Some of the changes proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget appear to embed political objectives in the analysis. That isn’t what benefit-cost analysis — required by presidents for more than 40 years and increasingly by courts — is supposed to do. Such modifications would reduce its value and threaten to upend the longstanding bipartisan reliance on best practices and evidence. This could lead to even wilder partisan swings in policy than the country now faces,” added Susan Dudley and W. Kip Viscusi, both past presidents of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.
Crews has been focused on Biden’s efforts to hide pricey regulations. In a new op-ed published in Forbes, he highlighted the doubling of the baseline for the administration to describe regulations as “significant.”
In calling on Congress to stop the change, he wrote: “Up until Joe Biden’s April Executive Order 14,094 on ‘Modernizing Regulatory Review,’ rules with $100 million in annual effects were deemed ‘economically significant.’ Now, however, that term has now been dropped by the Office of Management and Budget, a threshold of $200 million is now required for a rule to be deemed ‘Section 3(f)(1) significant,’ referencing a clause in the Clinton-era regulatory-review directive that Biden sees himself as upgrading.”
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Dudley and Viscusi led several other budget experts in a letter to the administration warning about changes that could politicize regulations and open the door to subsequent administrations altering those it doesn’t like, injecting uncertainty.
“Some of the proposed changes depart from widely accepted practices, principles, and evidence, and could be perceived as favoring particular policy preferences. If that is the case, a future administration with a different set of policy preferences would likely replace this circular with another designed to support its preferred policies, leading to wide swings in regulatory actions,” they warned in the letter.
