The Biden Regulatory Agenda.

• Author: Batkins, Sam

President Biden began his term in office by reinstituting much of the Barack Obama administration's regulatory apparatus. For instance, on the same day he was inaugurated, his administration issued a document affirming the basic principles of Obama's Executive Order 13563, which instructed executive branch agencies to design a process to retroactively review current regulations to see if their benefits were, indeed, larger than their costs. It also repealed outgoing president Donald Trump's EO 13771 establishing a "one-in, two-out" regulatory budget, which constrained the regulatory agencies to some degree.

However, the Biden administration also indicated that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is tasked with reviewing executive agencies' major regulatory activities, would take a more proactive and expansive approach to its regulatory agenda. Biden issued a memorandum, entitled "Modernizing Regulatory Review," that goes beyond the regulatory policy of the Obama era, establishing four distinct but related priorities:

* OIRA will continue to fulfill its duty of inter-agency regulatory review, despite some progressive objections.

* It updates OIRA in ways that reflect "new developments in scientific and economic understanding" by asking the agency to account for societal costs and benefits that are difficult to quantify.

* It asks OIRA to examine the distributional effect of regulations.

* It urges OIRA to take a more proactive role to advance regulations that will yield significant benefits.

Obama redux or progressive vision? I Both liberals and conservatives have taken issue with OIRA at times. Some progressives have criticized OIRA (especially during Republican administrations) as a deregulatory cudgel intent on suppressing public health and safety protections to protect businesses. Republicans have derided OIRA (during Democratic administrations) as a transactional middleman that does little more than slow down onerous regulations that will eventually be published.

As in most political debates, the truth largely sits in the middle. For Biden, an incrementalist approach would have OIRA hew to the Obama administration's progressive vision while bolstering the pro-regulatory tilt of Biden's own administration.

Concerning the Biden memorandum specifically, it is unclear what "new developments in scientific and economic understanding" will mean in practice. Without a robust sample of regulations to review--and it...