On the heels of announcement of the Obama Administration’s Executive Order (EO) 13563,Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review (76 FR 3821, January 18, 2011), EPA announced a new “Retrospective Review” website aimed at receiving public input on the future design of EPA’s plan to respond to the EO. EPA’s Retrospective Review website suggests that the public provide comment by specific categories: issue or impact (such as benefits and costs), program area (such as water) or general ideas, which span multiple categories.
EO 13563 directs each federal agency to review all its existing regulations to see if any are too costly or have outlived their usefulness. The EO asks each agency to consider “how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome.” Specifically, the EO calls on every agency to develop “a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded or repealed to make the agency’s regulatory program more effective and or less burdensome in achieving its regulatory objectives.”
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a guidance memorandum dated February 2 to all executive branch departments, agencies and independent agencies. The memo states that within 120 days, each agency must develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law, its resources and regulatory priorities. In it, agencies must describe how they will periodically review their existing significant regulations to determine whether any should be modified, expanded, streamlined or repealed.
OMB's guidance memorandum on Executive Order 13563 is available online. “Many important rules have been in place for some time. The aim is instead to create a defined method and schedule for identifying certain significant rules that are obsolete, unnecessary, unjustified, excessively burdensome, or counterproductive,” the memo states.
The White House announcement of the final order on regulatory review was expected for some time. In March 2009, AMWA submitted a letter (no. 86) to the White House in response to its request for comment about updating a Clinton-era EO on regulatory review.