White House Delayed Avalanche of New Regulations Until After 2012, For "Clearly Political" Purposes

Heritage noted, in 2012, that the Administration's rush to regulate slowed down in that election year:

Last fall, Heritage Foundation analysts noted an eerie silence coming from Obama regulatory agencies. The production of new rules, which until then had been in overdrive, slipped into a lower gear. And the regulatory agenda, which the Administration was required by law to release every spring and fall, did not appear. Noting the odd silence, Heritage research fellow Diane Katz speculated that the rules were being deliberately delayed until after the election year.

Obama officials scoffed at such speculation.

But a Washington Post report published over the weekend now indicates that's precisely what happened.

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said....

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection.

The number and scope of delays under Obama went well beyond those of his predecessors, who helped shape rules but did not have the same formalized controls, said current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

The report was prepared by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an "independent agency that advises the federal government on regulatory issues." They interviewed more than a dozen "senior agency officials" at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which "oversees the implementation of federal rules."

OIRA officials -- political appointees -- put the brakes on the rush to regulate:

The officials interviewed for the ACUS report, whose names were withheld from publication by the study authors, said that starting in 2012 they had to meet with an OIRA desk officer before submitting each significant rule for formal review. They called the sessions “Mother-may-I” meetings, according to the study.

The accounts were echoed by four Obama administration political appointees and three career officials interviewed by The Post.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, a former official said that only two managers had the authority to request a major rule in 2012: then-administrator Lisa P. Jackson and deputy administrator Bob Perciasepe. Perciasepe and OIRA’s director at the time, Cass Sunstein, would have “weekly and sometimes semi-weekly discussions” to discuss rules that affected the economy, one said, because they had political consequences, the person said.

“As we entered the run-up to the election, the word went out the White House was not anxious to review new rules,” the former official said.

Sunstein, who has returned to his post as a Harvard Law School professor, declined to comment.

The Administration delayed defining what constituted an Obamacare-compliant "essential benefits plan" in order to avoid "controversy." Thus avoiding an earlier discussion about the "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" lie, or, as the leftist media calls it, the "wrong promise that Obama inadvertently made in order to offer a pithy slogan to the public in response to Republican lies about Obamacare."

Other delayed regulations include environmental-protection rules, which we are now, of course, are told are essential, and must not be delayed a moment longer, lest the birds and the children should perish.

posted by Ace at 03:34 PM

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