Biden Gives Regulators a Free and Heavy Hand

Buried in the 2½-foot stack of President Biden's first-day executive orders is hard evidence that someone in the new administration not only understands the OMB but knows how to use it.

You probably didn't pay attention to "Modernizing Regulatory Review," a presidential memo released Jan. 20.

The presidential memo, similar to an executive order, is intended to "Ensure that the review process promotes policies that reflect new developments in scientific and economic understanding, fully accounts for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify, and does not have harmful anti-regulatory or deregulatory effects".

Translated from OMB-speak into English, that means throw out traditional measures, use anything you can possibly find to promote the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis, and don't do anything that might impair new regulation or remove old rules.

The message from the Biden administration is that wherever cost-benefit analyses might create an impediment to regulation, OMB should feel free to throw out the math and use whatever it can find in the annals of some fringe academic journal to justify the new rules.

What is the scope of these changes? Pretty much everything: "These recommendations should provide concrete suggestions on how the regulatory review process can promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations," the presidential memo instructs.

The Biden administration should reconsider the memo on regulatory review and reaffirm its commitment to concrete, transparent and provable cost-benefit analyses in its regulatory practice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-gives-regulators-a-free-and-heavy-hand-11611703468