Gray Matters

Promptly after the election, President-elect Joe Biden’s official “transition” team announced that climate change would be one of the new administration’s top four policy priorities. The transition’s website listed a variety of familiar and new ways in which the Biden administration intends to grapple with this issue. And, of course, this is just one of several issues of energy and environmental... Source

Over the last four years, the Trump administration continued the longstanding framework for OIRA regulatory oversight, but it also developed new oversight tools, such as the new regulatory budgeting framework of Executive Order 13771. How will the new Biden Administration structure its own frameworks for regulatory oversight? What old and new tools will it keep? And what new innovations might it... Source

In 2008, Michael Livermore and Richard Revesz wrote Retaking Rationality, a book arguing that cost-benefit analysis of regulations should be recognized not as an anti-regulatory weapon, but rather a nonideological tool for promoting good government. Now they return with a new book, Reviving Rationality, which analyzes developments since 2008, and proposes further reforms for cost-benefit analysis... Source

Governments make rules. But governments often grant exemptions from those rules, either when the rules are written or in the ways they are enforced. And those exemptions are the subject of a new article: “ Unrules” by Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler, and Daniel Walters. Professors Coglianese and Walters are our guests today. They describe the two main categories of unrules (“dispensations” and... Source

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Seila Law v. CFPB, and the upcoming case of Collins v. Mnuchin, return our attention to the Constitution’s allocation of powers among the President and Congress—and to the famous cases nearly a century ago when the Supreme Court tried to grapple with those issues amid the rise of the modern administrative state. As it happens, Professor Robert Post of the... Source

Last summer, the Supreme Court ended its year’s work with significant decisions involving administrative agencies. This new year now underway is set to include major cases involving agency structure and independence; transparency; and a host of other issues. To discuss these issues and broader themes of administrative governance, the Gray Center’s annual Supreme Court preview featured three... Source

Congress’s enactment of the Clean Air Act fifty years ago was meant to change our environmental impacts — but did it change Congress, too? That is the question that Prof. Frank Manheim of George Mason University’s Schar School of Public Policy asks in his new working paper, “ Transformation of Congressional Lawmaking by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and Its Effects.” In this episode, part of the Gray... Source

The executive branch’s bureaucracy gets a lot of attention. But Congress’s bureaucracy gets much less—yet it is extremely important. In a new Gray Center working paper titled “ The Congressional Bureaucracy,” Professors Abbe Gluck and Jesse Cross analyze several parts of Congress’s bureaucracy—some well-known, like the Government Accountability Office, and others less so, like the Office of Law... Source

We often think of modern cost-benefit analysis as being a requirement primarily of executive orders, not statutes. Needless to say, Executive Order 12291 and 12866, and other executive orders and presidential documents, are of central importance. But Congress has done much on matters of cost-benefit analysis, too, often requiring agencies to consider costs and benefits... Source

In 1994, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 50 years. Upon taking office, Speaker Newt Gingrich and his colleagues undertook major institutional reforms. What do those reforms tell us about conservatives’ modern views of the Constitution’s first branch of government, and how did those reforms affect Congress’s relationship to the President and... Source