Monday, November 05, 2012

President Obama's Missing Federal Regulatory Agenda


Every six months OMB is supposed to publish an updated edition of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The Agenda that should have been published last Spring never appeared, and now it's almost time for the Fall Agenda and its supplemental Regulatory Plan to be published.
The Regulatory Agenda is supposed to be an important tool to monitor the Administration's regulatory activity, and it is used by industry, consumer groups, scholars, and interested members of the public to keep up with the status of pending and planned regulations.
It may be that in light of the Obama Administration's regulatory onslaught, President Obama preferred not to call attention to the heightened regulatory activity of the federal government. But that's not a reason -- or at least it's never been thought so before -- for non-compliance with the requirement to issue the Regulatory Agenda on a semi-annual basis.
For more on this, and the Obama Administration's record-setting regulatory activity, see this very good piece, President Obama's Hidden Tax, in Forbes by Wayne Crews.