Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration’s “regulatory czar,” gave a speech at the Brookings Institution this afternoon. Regular readers are probably familiar with most of its content — the open government directive, OMB’s dashboards for transparency and IT projects. But Sunstein made a couple of interesting points on the limits of open government initiatives.
Browsing: Regulation
Rahm Emanuel issued a memo this afternoon freezing all government regulation, according to a press release from the White House. The memo tells agency heads not to submit any new regulations (proposed or final) until they can be reviewed by a Cabinet official appointed by President Obama. It also orders agencies to withdraw any regulations not yet published in the Federal Register. And it advises them to delay implementing any final regulations that have not yet taken effect — an effort to delay the dozens of Bush-era “midnight regulations.” This is not unprecedented: Former White House chief of staff Andrew…
12:27 PM: Obama pledged more “transparency and accountability” for the government’s rescue efforts under his administration. 12:18 PM: Obama called on the next Congress to put together an economic stimulus plan in January; he also promised to unveil proposals from his economic team in the next few weeks. Obama also acknowledged that any government stimulus plan could require cuts to other government programs: We’ll have to scour our federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices. 12:10 PM: Not that it was much of a secret, but now it’s official. The president-elect just finished his speech at…
The Congressional Research Service has an interesting report out (pdf) on the presidential transition. CRS found that the president’s “lame duck” status between Election Day and Inauguration Day leads to all kinds of interestingly named activities, everything from “midnight rulemaking” to “burrowing in.” We’ll have a longer look at “midnight rulemaking” in next week’s Federal Times, which comes out on Nov. 3. Basically, though, agency heads push through all kinds of last-minute regulations. November-January is usually a quiet time for regulatory agencies, but their output doubles during a transition year — and many of the regulations are approved without proper…
The Washington Post reported today that three federal agencies — the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the New York branch of the Fed — are “vying for control” of the $53 trillion market in “credit-default swaps,” contracts that insure financial institutions who make risky investments. It’s an interesting look inside the infighting that plagues financial regulators. A horde of agencies oversees the financial world: the SEC, CFTC, two agencies to regulate banks, the Fed, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Treasury Department… In the era of deregulation (now ending), that was fine. But our fragmented regulators…
Election Day is still two weeks away, but the next president already has good-government groups lining up to offer advice. The latest is the Project on Government Oversight, which today issued a set of recommendations for the next president. Many of them are obvious good-government suggestions, but many also come at opportune times. POGO points out, for example, that the government’s oversight and regulatory role has been “decimated” in recent years. Given the recent scandals at the Minerals Management Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, that’s not an overstatement. There’s also a call for inspectors…
The FDA announced this week that it will start opening foreign offices – first in China and India, and eventually in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. It’s a promising step for the agency, which is simply terrible at inspecting foreign plants: Less than 30 percent of foreign drug plants, for example, are checked on schedule. So the FDA deserves a lot of credit for starting the program and investing $30 million to open those offices. But the announcement leaves some unanswered questions. In the United States, FDA inspectors can walk into any food or drug plant, unannounced, and…