Regulations czar: Biden turns OMB into ‘Co-conspirator in over-regulation’

December 10, 2023 09:12 AM

Scrapping promises of transparency, President Joe Biden has begun to hide the costs of his most expensive rules and red tape and turned his top regulations watchdog into a lap dog for federal agencies, according to a top independent expert.

In shifting away from policing the so-called swamp’s hidden actions, Americans and United States businesses are likely to face a wave of costly regulations as the administration moves to get around Congress with executive orders and actions to push its agenda on policies from climate change to killing gas-powered vehicles, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The shift was revealed in the latest Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, according to Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Crews, an expert on regulations and the Unified Agenda, said on the CEI’s blog that the fall report began to put into place the effort to hide costly rules.

He cited two major changes. The first was the administration’s increase in the cost of high-priced rules it has to reveal from $100 million to $200 million. The second was the shift in the role of OMB, which is the president’s budget and management arm.

Crews explained the changes in plain language in hopes of winning attention from Congress to reform the process.

“First, the new Unified Agenda is missing a reference to ‘economically significant’ regulations that cost $100 million or more. That’s because the Biden administration’s ‘Modernizing Regulatory Review’ executive order eliminated that category — and the extra scrutiny it once triggered from the Office of Management and Budget. Instead, the administration doubled the threshold to $200 million and renamed it the bureaucratic-sounding ‘Section 3(f)(1) significant.’ In short, the Unified Agenda now captures a smaller number of higher cost rules,” Crews revealed.

“The second significant change since the spring edition is OMB’s finalization of so-called ‘Circular A4’ guidance on regulatory analysis. For this and future Agendas, the big policy change will be a shift away from the watchdog role of OMB. Instead of strict supervision and cost-benefit analysis of regulations, OMB is tasked with collaborating with agencies — mainly to carry out controversial progressive goals this administration regards as net beneficial. In short, this fall 2023 Agenda marks a shift from the OMB as a watchdog to a potential co-conspirator in over-regulation, leaving us with no one supervising the regulators,” he warned.

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The changes highlight why Crews has been on a campaign to encourage Congress to create a federal “Office of No” that would watch over regulations pushed quietly by administrations.

“One solution is an Office of No that would replace or supplement the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Its sole tasks would be to make the case against new and existing regulations and to facilitate ongoing sunsetting and streamlining,” Crews said in a separate report.