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2020-12-23 The Most Important Biden Appointee No One Has Heard Of One role that remains unfilled will be vital to enacting Biden’s policy agenda: the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Although many Americans have never heard of OIRA, the office is well known among corporate lobbyists, who take full advantage of its ability to stop regulations in their tracks. Since the Reagan administration, OIRA has earned a reputation as “the death row of well-meaning legislation.”
A division of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), OIRA was created to review agency regulations in an effort to streamline the federal rulemaking process. Its broad mandate gives it the ability to change, stall, or kill regulations written by every federal agency other than a few that are independent by statute, such as the SEC. OIRA can interfere in the technical details of agency decision-making that are best resolved by the agency’s experts.
OIRA is tasked with weighing the benefits of regulation against the costs in order to “maximize the welfare” of society. In practice, OIRA often deploys a myopic economic framework that prioritizes the cost to industry over the well-being of people. The creators of this cost-benefit analysis sought to promote societal welfare through a narrow and inaccurate vision of “economic efficiency” over all other concerns, including climate change, racial discrimination, and health crises. The result has largely benefited those who are already profiting off an economy that is deeply unequal and discriminatory.
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