[Dialogue] House Balks at Bush Order for New Powers

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, July 4, 2007 by the Associated Press
<http://www.ap.org>  

House Balks at Bush Order for New Powers

by Jim Abrams

President Bush this month is giving an obscure White House office new powers
over regulations affecting health, worker safety and the environment.
Calling it a power grab, Democrats running Congress are intent on stopping
him.

The House voted last week to prohibit the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422,
signed by Bush last January and due to take effect July 24.

The order requires federal officials to show that private companies, people
or institutions failed to address a problem before agencies can write
regulations to tackle it. It also gives political appointees greater
authority over how the regulations are written.

The House measure "stops this president or any president from seizing the
power to rewrite almost every law that Congress passes, laws that protect
public health, the environment, safety, civil rights, privacy and on and
on," said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., its sponsor.

"OIRA has quietly grown into the most powerful regulatory agency in
Washington," the House Science investigations subcommittee, chaired by
Miller, said in a report in April.

The administration contends Bush's order merely strengthens a similar
directive issued by President Clinton in 1993 giving the White House budget
office oversight of federal agency rulemaking.

Andrea Wuebker, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, which
manages the White House regulatory affairs office, said the order, along
with an OMB good guidance bulletin, "will help increase the quality,
accountability and transparency of agency guidance documents."

Bush's executive order:

*	Requires agencies to identify "market failures," where the private
sector fell short in dealing with a problem, as a factor in proposing a
rule. The White House regulatory affairs office is given authority to assess
those conclusions. 
*	States that no rulemaking can go forward without the approval of an
agency's Regulatory Policy Office, to be headed by a presidential appointee.

*	Directs each agency to provide an estimate of costs and benefits of
regulations. 
*	Requires agencies to inform the White House regulatory affairs
office of proposed significant guidance documents on complying with rules.
Critics say this will create a new bottleneck delaying the issuance of
guidelines needed to comply with federal regulations. 

"This can only further delay implementing health, safety and environmental
protections," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a private
watchdog group that joined numerous labor and good-government groups,
including the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists,
in opposing Bush's order.

Miller tried unsuccessfully at a hearing in April to persuade the White
House regulatory affairs office's former acting administrator, Steven
Aitken, to reveal what private groups might have been involved in rewriting
the Clinton-era order.

Aitken stressed that the Clinton order also used market failure as a
criteria in advancing new rules and directing agencies to appoint regulatory
policy officers, many of whom were political appointees. Rep. Dana
Rohrabacher, R-Calif., backed Aitken up at the hearing.

"The pattern is that we are challenging the president's authority, hoping to
find a mistake and then making a lot of political hay about it," Rohrabacher
said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted in an analysis last
February that President Reagan made the White House regulatory affairs
office the central clearinghouse for substantive rulemaking, reviewing 2,000
to 3,000 proposed regulations per year. With Clinton's 1993 order, White
House reviews of proposed regulations dropped to between 500 and 700 a year,
the researchers said.

Bill Kovacs, vice president for regulatory affairs with the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, said the White House's regulatory affairs office now has about 35
people to keep track of the 4,000 rules federal agencies issue every year.

"It's only reasonable that you have some way of monitoring what your
agencies are doing," Kovacs said, adding that the White House needs to
assert control over the process.

___

The House bill is HR 2829.

On the Net:

Text of Jan. 18 Executive Order 13422: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/orders

Copyright C 2007 The Associated Press

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/04/2296/

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070704/d3aba0da/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 6731 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070704/d3aba0da/attachment-0001.gif