Alternate Title
“Modernizing Regulatory Review”: A Short-Lived Abandonment of More Than Four Decades of Regulatory Review and Benefit-Cost Analysis
Keywords
benefit-cost analysis, centralized regulatory review, Office of Management and Budget, OMB, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA, Biden administration, Modernizing Regulatory Review, MRR, Executive Order 14, 094
Abstract
"President Biden’s Modernizing Regulatory Review (MRR) initiative fundamentally altered regulatory procedures, practices, and centralized oversight that had been in place since 1981 when they were formalized by President Reagan in Executive Order 12,291. MRR proceeded in three phases. First, a Memorandum issued on President Biden’s first day in office telegraphing the broad outlines of the plan. Second, more than two years later, an Executive Order codifying the MRR memorandum was issued, combined with implementation guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). And third, OMB guidance on the conduct of regulatory BCA was radically revised, clearly with an eye toward favoring the Administration’s policy objectives. The MRR Memorandum included both admirable and worrisome provisions—admirable, insofar as the Memo signaled a revitalized interest that regulatory BCA should include estimates of the distributional effects of regulations on recognized subpopulations of concern, such as the poor; worrisome, because MRR signaled a plan to overtly politicize regulatory BCA methods in a manner calculated to benefit the Administration’s agenda; and transformed OIRA’s role from providing White House entities independent review of agencies’ regulatory BCAs to serving as facilitators and expediters of the Administration’s agenda. In short, the MRR Initiative transformed regulatory BCA and OIRA review into policy-based evidence-making enterprises. Then Donald Trump was elected to a second, discontinuous term. Immediately, Biden executive orders building the Modernizing Regulatory Review (MRR) Initiative were revoked and agency heads were directed to remove all vestiges of it from their respective jurisdictions. The politicized 2023 revision of OMB Circular A-4 was rescinded; the 2003 version was restored; and the Biden administration’s key policy goals were terminated and generally replaced with opposite policy goals. Whether the Trump administration restored regulatory review and regulatory benefit-cost analysis, or replaced their politicization by the Biden administration with a new politicization of its own, cannot reliably be assessed at this early date. This subject will be the subject of a future analysis."
Recommended Citation
Richard Belzer, “Modernizing Regulatory Review”: A Short-Lived Abandonment of More Than Four Decades of Regulatory Review and Benefit-Cost Analysis, 19 FIU L. Rev. 1081 (2025), https://doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.19.4.9.
Included in
Administrative Law Commons, Environmental Law Commons, President/Executive Department Commons
