The Decline and Fall of the “Regulatory Czar”

Now, the office doesn’t even have a home page, and its boss is lawyer who faces possible disbarment.

OIRA, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was known as “the most powerful agency you’ve never heard of.”  That was only three years ago. Under Trump 2, however, OIRA seems to have become a minor outpost of the Office of Management and Budget run by Russell Vought.  The main purpose of the office was to oversee the use of cost-benefit analysis by regulatory agencies.  The Trump Administration has all but abandoned this analytical tool by refusing to quantify regulatory benefits, so it’s now cost-benefit  analysis. As a result, OIRA seems to be adrift.

One sign of this declining importance is that it’s hard to even find the name of the person running the office. It’s not on the Regulations.gov page that it runs.  That website does have a FAQ page, which includes the following:

1. Who is the current OIRA leadership?
2. The Office of the Administrator was created by Congress when it established OIRA in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980. The Administrator is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

That’s false. Trump hasn’t nominated anyone to fill this office.

The FAQ has a link that supposedly goes to OIRA’s White House page, but the link is broken, and is far as I can tell, OIRA doesn’t have a White House webpage. It’s barely mention on the OMB site either. For instance, OMB’s website has a recent news item trumpeting its deregulatory success. The item mentions OIRA as an OMB office, but the only identified official is the head of OMB, with no mention of the head of OIRA. There’s also no link I can find anywhere on the White House website to OIRA.

So, who is the head of OIRA?  The answer isn’t hard to find from non-governmental sources such as his LinkedIn page: it’s Jeffrey Clark, who was the Acting Director but is now the Associate Director since his acting appointment ran out. The shift seems to have been in response to claims that it was illegal for him to continue to hold the acting position, while still giving him purported authority to run the office as Associate Director.

The reason for all these maneuvers is that even the servile Republican majority in the Senate might be reluctant to confirm his appointment as OIRA Administrator. Clark is best known as an avid participant in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Some of his actions led to a recommendation by the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility that he be disbarred for misconduct.

So here we have an office that has lost its main reason for existing, headed by a lawyer who faces possible disbarment and apparently has no chance of Senate approval. So far as I can tell, OIRA is now just a conduit between agencies and White House political staff. It’s quite a fall from the glory days of the regulatory czar.

administrative law, Cost Benefit Analysis, environmental economics, OIRA, presidential administration, regulatory economics, Trump Administration