Analysis: Agencies must rethink regulatory reform
Common Good\'s Phillip Howard shares ways agencies can cut regulations to meet the President\'s June executive order.
The White House wants your agency to find and cut unnecessary federal regulations. The Obama administration says agencies have already identified 500 reforms they say will save billions of dollars over the next few years.
But the problem is not the number of regulations as much as the way federal employees approach regulations, said Philip Howard, chair of Common Good, a non-partisan not-for-profit organization.
Howard writes in a blog post:
What’s wrong with regulation is not generally that the goals are bad, or overreaching—most Americans want clean water and air, and safe workplaces, and toys without lead paint on them. What’s wrong is that regulation is suffocating—it tells us exactly how to do things, diverting energy from the job at hand to mindless compliance.
Ridding the government of “stupid” regulations won’t save much money in the long-term, Howard said in an interview with In Depth. His proposal to move to a more “open framework” leaves room for more debate, but it also allows a “more efficient way of resolving those disputes,” Howard said.
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