Missed this post by Mike Rappaport back in December based on an idea he describes in Cato’s Regulation:
The idea is to establish an administrative agency with the power to deregulate – to identify undesirable regulations passed by other agencies and to repeal those regulations. … For example, this deregulatory agency could identify an environmental regulation that is particularly problematic and attempt to repeal it. Ultimately, the EPA might object to this action and the President would have to decide the matter. If Presidents, including pro-regulation Presidents like Obama, get to decide the issue, would the deregulatory agency have any effect?
The likely answer to the final question is “yes, at least at the margins” because every administration, from the most to the least regulatory in its instincts, is the scene of internal debates, and such an agency would probably work to strengthen the hand of regulatory skeptics even if it did not win all of its inter-administration battles.
One Comment
Any such agency would have to gather and foster knowledge in all of the possible subject areas in which it might wish to tread, and so would have to be rather large, plus the experts in most any field are already IN that field, so any such agency would wither of regulatory capture very quickly in its life.
At that point, any such agency would become the excuse of choice for Congress to abdicate its job of oversight and review – “any change should come from the agency that was created to CAUSE change, not us” – and an overlying huge infrastructureal bureaucracy would need to be created to take over and administer the new process of citizen suggestions for statutory and regulatory amendments.
But another federal department would of course be a welcome addition.