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The chamber approved Richard Revesz to direct the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The bureau, which serves as a federal regulations clearinghouse, has been without a confirmed leader for years.

Richard Revesz will take over as the long-awaited head of the Biden administration’s rulemaking review office, a confirmation that gives hope for rule-watchers looking ahead to more stringent environmental standards. Revesz was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the US Office of Management and Budget. He’s likely to be the most progressive director “we’ve ever had in terms of his approach to environmental policies, no question about that,” according to Temple Law School professor Amy Sinden.

Multiple Republican senators are preventing quick passage of President Joe Biden's nominee to run his White House regulations bureau. Senate Environment and Public Works ranking member Shelley Moore Capito objected Tuesday to confirming New York University environmental law professor Richard Revesz to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, by voice vote.

Revesz is a leading expert on environmental policy and regulation. He is the AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law. He founded, and led for more than a decade, the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank and advocacy organization that promotes desirable climate change and environmental policies. Revesz was elected to The American Law Institute in 1991 and has served as the Institute’s Director since 2014.

A law professor for more than 30 years, Revesz specializes in climate change and regulation. He will also oversee Biden’s promise to tame the sway of corporations over US regulations and increase the influence of Americans of color and low-income people. He said in his confirmation hearing that he supports a traditional approach to evaluating regulations and wouldn’t completely overhaul past calculations.

The Senate approved Richard Revesz’s nomination by voice vote to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, housed within the White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the regulatory process across the government, approves government information collections, establishes government statistical practices and coordinates federal privacy policy. Revesz “is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy,” said the announcement from the White House in September when President Biden nominated him.

By filing an amicus brief on Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Integrity challenged the American Petroleum Act's arguments that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act bars the Department of Interior from considering nonlocal environmental effects resulting from offshore development. In the brief, IPI urged the D.C. Circuit to uphold the district court's ruling that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management violated NEPA and to reject arguments that the Inflation Reduction Act moots the issue of whether Lease Sale 257 violated NEPA.

The Institute for Policy Integrity is urging officials to create granular assessments of emissions tied to grid electricity used to generate hydrogen, while also placing robust requirements on the use of renewable energy credits to offset emissions from such power.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law examined the question, “How Do We Know if Hydrogen is Clean?” and noted that "the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act includes “major incentives for ‘clean’ hydrogen. Now agencies need to decide what counts as clean.” The institute gave the Department of Energy, which is charged with developing a standard for clean hydrogen, a series of recommendations.

EPA has led the way in crafting these types of metrics in the past, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. The agency began working on the social cost of methane and integrated it into some rulemakings before the Interagency Working Group undertook its own work. "The approaches that EPA took and that of the Interagency Working Group ultimately were consistent with each other — if that's any indication of what might be happening here," Sarinsky said.