Paralysis by analysis: Jim Tozzi's regulation to end all regulation.

• Author: Mooney, Chris

If you stand near the fountain at the center of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and gaze up at the surrounding buildings, you should be able to spot a large brass telescope in a seventh story window above Books-A-Million. The device belongs to Jim Tozzi, a former Reagan budget official, well-remunerated corporate consultant, self-described regulatory policy "nerd," and self-confessed voyeur. The telescope has become a "landmark," brags the 65-year-old Tozzi, a gleeful cut-up whose "JT" monogrammed shirt cuffs belie his musician-live patter. "That can get you in a lot of trouble," he adds. "I'm a dirty old man. I love it."

If Tozzi is shameless about his extracurricular activities, he's equally proud of the work that occupies his daylight hours. As the flamboyant head of an industryfunded, for-profit think tank called the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, Tozzi has made his career in the decidedly unflamboyant field of government regulation. In the three decades or so since the Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other agencies were formed, industry has become adept both at weighing down the rulemaking process with years of preliminaries and at challenging regulations once promulgated. And for years, Tozzi--thanks to official contacts and regulatory expertise gleaned from two decades in government--has been a master of the game, gumming up the regulatory works and, as he puts it, giving environmentalists and consumer advocates "gastronomical pains."

But now Tozzi has a chance to change the rules of the game itself. With assistance from the Bush administration, a little-known statute called the "Data Quality Act"--conceived by Tozzi and passed with little debate by Congress three years ago--allows businesses to challenge not just government regulations, but the taxpayer-sponsored science which agencies rely upon to formulate these rules in the first place.

On its face, the Data Quality Act merely requires government agencies to field complaints over the data, studies, and reports they disseminate, in order to ensure the "quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity" of the information. Though seemingly unobjectionable, this provides a new workload for agencies that could impinge upon their other duties. But it's just the beginning. The Bush administration has used the DQA as a springboard to implement an unprecedented "peer review" system for government science, a cumbersome set of protocols that was strenuously opposed by the nation's science community, which saw little in the original plan resembling standard academic peer review. (As we went to press, the White House released a revised "peer review" bulletin that appeared to respond to some of these criticisms.)

If these efforts succeed, industry groups will have a new set of tools to stop regulations before they even get started--often by using questionable scientific critiques paid for by industry to challenge legitimate science sponsored by taxpayers. "Anyone who is involved in the regulatory process knows it begins ten years or so before you ever see a rule," says...