At a time when the federal government is assessing its regulatory review processes, a new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at the New York University School of Law gave states an average grade of D+ for their regulatory reviews based on whether they had realistic requirements for review, whether the review delayed rules, whether costs and benefits were considered in a balanced way and whether the analysis considered policy alternatives.
In response to President Obama’s Executive Order (EO) 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review, U.S. EPA in February requested public input on how to design its regulatory review plan. 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.” AMWA and its Regulatory Committee are developing comments on this initiative.
In 52 Experiments with Regulatory Review: The Political and Economic Inputs into State Rulemaking, IPI compiled the regulatory practices of all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) in a document that compared each set of laws and guidelines paper with direct feedback from state government leaders. Noting that nearly 20 percent of the American economy is regulated by state governments, the Institute cited major concerns about how regulatory decisions are made: “Although states routinely regulate industries whose economic footprints climb into the hundreds of millions of dollars, these rules are often made ad hoc, risking inefficient results that limit public benefit.”
IPI recommendations to state legislatures included: reforming existing laws to promote more balanced consideration of costs and benefits of rules; developing “regulatory effectiveness” offices similar to the regulatory review office in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget; pushing toward greater transparency; and facilitating better communication between the states on methods and concepts.
52 Experiments with Regulatory Review is online