But I'm just intrigued by the whole question of guidance as a legal product. As an Adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law from 2002 to 2006, she designed and taught courses on regulations and led regulatory clinics. There's about a hundred statistical agencies and components across the government, and they do a lot of really important work.

The OLC opinion concludes that no individual member of Congress has authority to make mandatory oversight requests of executive branch officials. Paul J. Ray:  Yeah. Also, this call is being recorded and will be transcribed for use as a podcast on The Federalist Society's website. She and her colleagues curate a set of, we call them, statistical directives that keep the measures prepared by all the statistical agencies across the federal government accurate and informative. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work. Paul J. Ray:  Well, thanks, Dean.

And we're going to wrap up at about the 35- or 40-minute mark, so a slightly abbreviated version of our call today. Susan Dudley was nominated by the President on July 31, 2006, and appointed on April 4, 2007, to serve as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of … So we're closing the gap between important guidance and important regulations. We evaluate the forms to make sure that they're likely to get useful information but not be unduly burdensome to the public.

They tried to comply with the law and the appropriate remedy for them might be for the agency to help them come back into compliance, rather than dropping a penalty on them. EO 13771 has sort of a one-two punch approach. Caller 2:  All right.

In addition to reviewing government collections of information from the public under the Paperwork Reduction Act, OIRA reviews draft proposed and final regulations under Executive Order 12866 and develops and oversees the implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information policy, privacy, and statistical policy. Dean Reuter:  Tremendous. Neither characterization was quite right. And the goal is really to ensure that each regulation has the benefit of expertise and reviews from across the government and is the product of a united executive voice—basically so the executive right hand knows what its left is doing. Part of what that means is that we're given reason, right? So far, we've talked about the "R" in OIRA; now, let's talk about the "I," which stands for "information." I wonder if anybody's ever done any research on how many agencies a given business, the average business—or even the average person—must respond to, must follow, at the federal level only.

There's the two-for-one requirement and then the cost caps. Professor Rao received questions from Senators on a wide scope of regulatory-related issues, ranging from her views on the President’s one-in-two-out executive order to the propriety of cost-benefit analysis for deregulatory, as well as pro-regulatory, efforts. This is historical material, "frozen in time" and not current OMB guidance. Symposium on Joanne Yates and Craig N. Murphy's "Engineering Rules", Legacy ABA AdLaw Section Notice and Comment Blog, Symposium on Rachel Potter's "Bending the Rules", Symposium on Delegated Management and Index Investing. I'll keep my remarks brief and, as Dean said, leave some time for questions at the end. Caller 3:  And if I could just briefly follow up that.

It's wonderful to be with you today. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is a statutory part of the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President. Professor Rao highlighted this point when she responded to Senator McCaskill’s line of questioning about the OLC opinion. One of my predecessors under President Obama, Cass Sunstein, had a very nice article about the EO saying this is something that moves the ship in the right direction. Of any Senator, by far Senator Heitkamp engaged in the most sustained discussion with Professor Rao about her nomination and her regulatory views.

In both instances, the rule of law is designed to constrain executive officials from imposing penalties whenever they want to. During the substantive portion of her opening remarks, Professor Rao offered her view of OIRA’s mission. From 1991 until 1998, she was a consultant to government and private clients at Economists Incorporated.

Thank you very much. It also contains information concerning implementation of Executive Order 13771 and Executive Order 13777. And the idea behind it is simply to pull back the long arm of Washington. Symposium on Peter Conti-Brown's The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, Reflections on Seminole Rock and the Future of Judicial Deference to Agency Regulatory Interpretations, Symposium on the ABA AdLaw Section’s Report to the President-Elect, Symposium of Jon D. Michael’s Constitutional Coup, Symposium on Racism in Administrative Law, Symposium on Federal Agency Guidance and the Power to Bind, Symposium on the Draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts, Subscribe to the Yale Journal on Regulation. For more information about OIRA, including the information collection review process, further information about the rulemaking process, and much more, see the full OIRA FAQ at reginfo.gov. One of the most important kinds of feedback I would ask for from the public is to submit comments on the cost-benefit analysis.

So we think that, between OIRA and the public's critique, those are ways to keep the analyses honest, and we think it has that effect. Hon. Very important job that you have. Senator John Hoeven (ND) asked Professor Rao to ensure that OIRA and OMB consider cost savings from public-private partnerships when they score the costs of federal projects. So, each year, during the preparation of the fall agenda, there's sort of a regulatory budget process that goes on that's a little bit like the spending budget process as well, in which agencies and OIRA discuss what kind of cost savings they will achieve in the next year.