Campaign advisers say presidential candidates are committed to regulatory reform
Next commander in chief is likely to support electronic rule-making and the revival of a federal advisory agency on administrative processes.
The next president, regardless of party, likely will streamline the government regulatory process, advisers to both campaigns said on Thursday.
Public sentiment and political realities will make the next administration focus on greater efficiency and transparency in government, said Ron Cass, an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain, and Steve Croley an adviser to Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. Cass is dean emeritus at the Boston University School of Law and Croley is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
"We have an opportunity here to improve the process, and we ought to improve the process," Cass said.
The two spoke at the 2008 American Bar Association Administrative Law Conference in Washington.
The ABA's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice recently released a report addressed to the next president, advising him on issues related to political appointments and the regulatory process. Croley and Cass said the focus of the report will play well with their candidates.
"This report ... contains a variety of very sensible, very useful, noncontroversial propositions," Cass said. Both advisers said they were largely in accord with ABA's recommendations.
The two men said their candidates were likely to support the expansion of electronic rule-making to streamline the federal regulatory process and make it more accessible to the public, as well as support the revival of the Administrative Conference of the United States. ACUS was a federal advisory agency that existed from 1968 to 1995 and made recommendations to the government on administrative processes.
The ABA strongly supports both of those issues.
"Government reorganization is already perennial and every time you reorganize you find the downside as well as the upside," Cass said. "But there are things to be done here. The e-rule-making proposal is a very important one, and one that ought to be moved on in the next administration."
Croley said government reform is "not a second-tier issue" for the Democratic nominee, and Obama incorporates four categories into his reform agenda: lobbying and ethics, government contracting, transparency, and technology. Obama views technology, Croley said, "as the means to all those other ends."
Cass agreed that technology is what will make opportunities for government reform more successful for the next administration than in the past.
"We've had a lot of different versions of [reinventing government]," Cass said. "One of the things that is different today is that the technology is so different. We've had such a radical evolution of Internet-based technology over the last five or six years that we have an opportunity now for gains on the way we do business."
With any major government reform initiative introduced in the next administration, "the starting point is different," Croley said.
"The starting point now is capitalizing on technologies that weren't available then; it's on increased transparency because the problem of transparency is much more acute than it was at the time [of reinventing government]," he said.