President Biden on day 1 made good, and then some, on his promise to become America’s regulator-in-chief.
Not only did he take action to wipe out the former administration’s effort to cut regulations, but he also surprised insiders by telling regulators to be less concerned about the costs of new rules and to judge them by the benefits to boosting his agenda.
“President Biden’s day one regulatory executive actions set a clear tone for his administration. Regulations will be a major — if not the primary — means of implementing the administration’s agenda,” said Dan Bosch, the director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum.
Biden’s actions so far indicate that he plans to follow the practice of recent administrations and issue regulatory changes out of the White House. But unlike former President Donald Trump, who killed regulations and kept additional costs to $40 billion, Biden appears eager to follow the path of his former boss, former President Barack Obama, who issued $890 billion in regulations.
In reviewing the president’s executive orders so far, Bosch said he found nothing surprising except one order that could radically change how regulations are judged.
Bosch said the change in determining if a new regulation is good, benefits will be weighted more than costs, also an Obama-era strategy that led to many costly regulations.
The budget office’s regulatory czar, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, looks at regulations to determine if the benefits are worth the costs. Bosch said that “the Biden memorandum appears to be based on an unfounded premise that this review is more concerned with costs than benefits. There is little evidence of this.”
Benefits can be hard to quantify, making it difficult to determine if the costs of a presidential idea is too high.
“While regulations should be more beneficial to society to justify costs, the seeming shift of priorities toward benefits rather than a balanced analysis appears aimed directly at justifying a significant ramp-up in federal regulatory activity over the next four years,” Bosch warned.
