The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Benefit-cost analysis has been part of the U.S. regulatory development process for over 40 years. The historic record, when coupled with recent actions, raises questions about its continued role ‒ in particular whether the focus will shift increasingly to considering costs without comparison to benefits.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Benefit-cost analysis has been a part of the United States regulatory process for a long time.  It began in the 1970s with efforts by Presidents Ford and Carter to centralize presidential control of regulatory agencies as regulations to protect public health proliferated (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23065472).  In Executive Order 12291, President Reagan required that agencies conduct regulatory impact analyses (RIA) (which included attempts to measure benefits and costs) for a subset of regulations.  While the process was continually revised afterwards (most notably by President Clinton, issuing Executive Order 12866 in 1993), the process for agency issuance of regulations and the role of RIAs looked roughly the same in 2016 as it did in 1981.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Regulatory Budgets in Theory and Practice

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

With the volatility and uncertainty of the first few weeks of the Trump administration, it is hard not to feel overwhelmed. One way to cope with information overload is to focus on issues where one has particular knowledge and interest. For me, that’s the regulatory process and benefit-cost analysis. In that vein, this post reviews some of the most consequential regulatory directives, and concludes that, while there is room for disagreement on details, the general requirement to base regulations on an understanding of benefits and costs remains intact.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration. 

 President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his first Administration achieved an unparalleled reduction in federal regulations. He has boasted, for example, that 25,000 pages of “job-destroying regulations” had been removed—more than under any previous President, he has said. Yet an examination of the Code of Federal Regulations, the authoritative repository of binding federal rules, tells a different story.