Bush's Midnight Regulations.

• Author: Dudley, Susan
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

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Veronique de Rugy scolds the outgoing president for what she projected he would do ("Bush's Midnight Regulations," February), but her projections turned out to be wildly wrong. She forecast that President George W. Bush would issue a record-setting 70 economically significant regulations (defined as regulations costing more than $100 million to implement) in the midnight period, which starts at the beginning of his final November in office and ends on the day the new president is inaugurated. In fact he issued 42, the fewest since Ronald Reagan.

By using the past tense--"Yet in his waning hours, President George W. Bush managed to rush through an unprecedented number of late-breaking regulations"--and publishing a quantitative graph, reason unfairly tars Bush with speculation masquerading as fact.

Susan Dudley

Former ddministrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Washington, DC

Veronique de Rugy replies: Susan Dudley, who has fought hard against midnight regulations in the last 18 months, is...