Now that the administration is moving into power, it's time to stretch beyond our known universe to the nuts and bolts of administrative power wielding. I want to flag one specific agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a Reagan-era internal executive agency that analyzes all potential regulations for cost/benefit analysis. This paper on what Obama can do with climate change (h/t Scott Paul at the Washington Note) notes.
For several decades, OIRA has been perhaps the most powerful agency in the Executive Branch standing in the way of needed environmental regulation. In the last eight years, the White House, working through OIRA, delayed, relaxed, or rejected many regulatory proposals. Most often OIRA did so for reasons having nothing to do with promoting economically efficient regulations (its ostensible purpose). Indeed, perusal of OIRA's comments on agency proposals reveals almost no engagement with economic issues. It reveals, instead, persistent efforts to water down scientific conclusions about environmental harm and a stubborn insistence that government regulation cannot be effective.
OIRA is situated within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the sprawling White House office that handles budgeting and management throughout the executive branch, and there's no way of knowing which corporate interests are lobbying or controlling its agenda. And every regulation goes through OIRA. Clinton actually strengthened OIRA, but if there's one agency that could use transparency or even outright elimination, it's this one.
There's a lot the executive branch can do without Congress, and the right has spent forty years recrafting the bureaucracy so that conservative principles are embedded in its DNA. That was actually the secret to Cheney's power, controlling paper flow in the White House. The transparency agenda of the Obama administration really has the potential to be a game-changer, if it gets into the real moldy nooks and crannies where Federal policy is set.
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