The Obama Approach to Public Protection: The Regulatory Process

When Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, the country faced problems unlike any the country had faced in generations. Each year, food-borne illnesses sickened millions, workplace hazards killed and injured thousands on the job, and air pollution triggered asthma attacks in millions of children and adults. Long procedural delays and political interference in the regulatory process caused deficits in safety and health standards, exacerbating these problems.President Obama seemed to understand the magnitude of the problems and the need to reestablish a badly needed role for government to provide public protections for the economy, workers, consumers, and the environment.This report is the third of three OMB Watch reports evaluating the Obama administration's record on regulatory issues. This report focuses on the regulatory process, including transparency and participation, regulatory analysis, scientific integrity, and the role of the White House, especially the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in shaping the administration's record. The first report addressed health, safety, and environmental rulemaking at federal agencies. The second report focused on federal agency enforcement.This report is divided into five chapters. Following the introduction is a brief history and summary of the existing regulatory process. The third section of the report addresses the role of the Obama White House in the regulatory process. Federal agencies' regulatory actions during the first 20 months of the administration are described in the fourth section, including both rulemaking activity and enforcement activity. Finally, there is a brief conclusion

The Administrative Conference and the Political Thumb

In his valuable contribution to this special issue, Richard Pierce underscores the role the Administrative Conference of the United States (“ACUS”) has played over the years in encouraging on the ground fact-finding by its consultants, who have usually been academics consulted at the beginning of careers that ever after would be marked by this encounter with the realities of the administrative process. As the mentee of Walter Gellhorn, who directed the remarkable empirical studies of federal agency procedures that underlay the eventual Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and who was a member of the ACUS Council from its initiation in 1964 until the end of its first active period, perhaps its most active member, it is easy to agree. My own first serious essay into administrative law scholarship, arranged by Walter, was an ACUS project that placed me for two months at the Bureau of Land Management offices in Denver, Colorado, observing how policy decisions concerning land use issues hap pened to arise in both adjudications and rulemakings – and learning that the prevailing supposition that agencies chose from the top which of these procedural routes to pursue was (at least there) unrealistic. Not unimportantly, the empirical research ACUS has promoted – like mine, like Professor Pierce’s, and like the others’ he recounts – has been research requiring physical presence and observation – interviews and facts on the ground more than the disembodied data sets that fuel the “empirical” research of economists and many political scientists. Next to actually serving in an administrative agency (the deepest of educational experiences about the subject we teach), it is research like this that is most likely to free the young scholar from the illusion that administrative law is all about, as Louis Jaffe once put it, “Judicial Control of Administrative Action.” What a contribution, then, ACUS has made not only to improvements in the functioning of government, but also to the way in which administrative law is presented in law school classrooms and written about in the academic literature

Meeting minutes : Department of Health and Human Services, Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 9-10, 2019

Publication date from document properties.bsc_minutes_may_2019.pdf20191038

Major Questions About Agency Authority: A Practical Discussion on the Impact of Limiting Administrative Authority

The Administrative Law Review’s Fall 2022 Symposium humanized administrative law while tackling substantive administrative law issues. With the human impact of administrative law as the touchpoint, the panels explored the practical implications of deregulation, nondelegation, and major questions. Resultant discussion transcribed below allowed for a thoughtful conversation, but one that was at the same time accessible to those who do not routinely practice in the space. We thank Professors Gillian Metzger, William Buzbee, Aram Gavoor, Kimberly Wehle, Jonas Monast, and Administrative Law Judge Doug Rawald for their contributions