Deep within OMB

President Bush has not announced who will direct OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The person mentioned most often is John Graham, who runs Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis -- a center popular with business interests.

"We'd like to see OIRA re-established as a gatekeeper," said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Chamber officials and many other business leaders believe that OIRA should function as it did during the Reagan Administration and the earlier Bush one -- as the office that sternly questions or even stops rules that agencies have proposed. They contend that President Clinton allowed agencies to run wild with their rule proposals.

But supporters of Clinton's approach say that OIRA worked with federal agencies to craft proposals, rather than simply waiting for the agencies to forward them to OMB. "OIRA was fully engaged in the process," insists Jacob Lew, Clinton's last OMB director. "We were partners rather than antagonists…. [We weren't] the traffic cop who said no."

In contrast, the Bush Administration is not hesitating to give the red light to regulatory proposals left over from the Clinton era. On Jan. 26, OMB Director Mitchell Daniels asked agency heads to withdraw from OIRA virtually all pending rules that were products of the Clinton Administration.

Under Bush, OIRA's role will almost certainly change to business's liking. Yet Josten insists that the chamber's goal is not to make the office unduly obstructionist. "The objective is to improve rule-making, not to stop rule-making," he said.

But some longtime OMB-watchers are suspicious. Under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, OMB essentially blackmailed agencies, one critic charged. In order to get more leverage over controversial rules, OIRA would hold up noncontroversial ones, said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, an independent public-interest group. "Things went in and may have never come out," he added. "At times, the Reagan and Bush OMBs ran roughshod over agencies."

That did not happen during the Clinton Administration, Lew said. He added that opponents of Clinton-issued rules may discover exactly how well OIRA operated if they try to challenge those regulations that have come under fire, including last-minute ones.

"It may be frustrating, for those who would like to reverse things, that OIRA did its job well," Lew said. "The record behind the rule-making, in every case I'm familiar with, is strong." Return to main story