Columbus, OH – The Buckeye Institute filed public comments on the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed changes to how the federal government determines the economic and social impacts of proposed federal regulations, which, if adopted, will make it easier to justify economically reckless regulations.

“These arbitrary and capricious revisions risk distorting the benefit-cost analyses on which the required [regulatory impact analyses] rely; likely violate the Administrative Procedure Act; and will subject agencies to more litigation,” wrote the authors, “All in all, [the proposed changes] stack[] the deck in the regulator’s favor, making it easier to justify economically reckless regulations that encroach on freedoms enjoyed by American industries and citizenry.” 

In its comments, experts from The Buckeye Institute’s Legal Center and Economic Research Center outlined three ways the proposed changes undermine the goal to “transparently produce credible, concise, and replicable” regulatory impact analyses. The proposed changes compromise the process by:

• Authorizing regulators to artificially raise the projected benefits of certain regulations to future generations of citizens, thus justifying the higher price tag of those regulations today;
• Sanctioning the same practice of artificially raising projected future benefits, but to a more extreme degree, when calculating benefits over even longer time horizons; and
• Allowing regulators to include noncitizens living abroad when calculating primary benefits.

The comments were authored by David C. Tryon, director of litigation, and Alex M. Certo, legal fellow, with The Buckeye Institute’s Legal Center; and Zachary D. Cady, associate economist, and Trevor W. Lewis, economic research analyst, with the Economic Research Center at The Buckeye Institute.

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