In the News

President Joe Biden made the anticipated nomination of Richard Revesz, a dean emeritus and professor at the New York University School of Law, for a key role overseeing regulations coming out of the executive brand. On Friday, the White House put up Revesz for the role of administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, promoting Revesz as an expert in environmental and regulatory law. The administration emphasized his work "advocating for protective and rational climate change and environmental policies." The role requires Senate confirmation. 

President Biden on Friday announced plans to nominate environmental law expert Richard Revesz to lead the small but powerful White House office in charge of overseeing federal regulations. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which sits within the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been without a permanent occupant since Biden took office.  

President Joe Biden has nominated environmental law attorney Richard Revesz to lead the White House’s regulations office, which hasn’t had a permanent leader in nearly two years. Biden nominated Revesz, a New York University law professor who specializes in climate change and regulation, to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The office is little-known outside Washington but wields tremendous power over how federal agencies execute the president’s agenda.

President Joe Biden is nominating Richard Revesz of New York University (NYU) law school to serve as the administrator of the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a key office that conducts interagency reviews of EPA and other federal rulemakings before they are released. Revesz, who founded NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI), has long been considered a top nominee but could not be reached for comment.

If courts can simply wipe away regulations at their discretion, it will have profound effects on how environmental agencies behave. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, judicial intervention led to significant setbacks to President Trump’s agenda, with the administration winning a mere 6 percent of cases against it.

Amid the national effort to reduce emissions, state laws play a key role, according to the United States Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors working to turn back climate change. The alliance released a resource Monday, “The Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases: A Guide for State Officials,” to help leaders better understand the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions. It was put together by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and is freely available to public officials.

The Inflation Reduction Act marks the most significant federal action on climate change yet, with about $370 billion of the $433 billion package teed up for green investments across the country. The IRA includes a slew of tax credits, grants, rebates and financing opportunities to encourage individuals, businesses and local governments to transition to greener energy and greater efficiency. “States that are prepared, that are well positioned, are going to be able to take advantage of this bill better than others,” said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “New York is very, very well positioned to do that.”

Transmission issues are the most common challenge, if not the most daunting, experts say. As such, states with steep clean energy goals need to make sure they're not just building fast, but building the right kind of transmission infrastructure, Justin Gundlach of the Institute for Policy Integrity told Law360. On top of that, developers need to make sure they're displacing legacy generation from coal or natural gas, he added. "It's great building renewables, but are they building the right kind of transmission in the right places that de-bottleneck access so that when they run, they displace emitting resources?" Gundlach said. "It's not just a matter of building a transmission line to a renewable facility — it's also a matter of reconfiguring your system so you are assured … you are able to deliver the power they generate wherever there is demand, and by doing so, you make them available to compete against a likely expensive, higher-emitting legacy system."

"Drip pricing is really not good for anyone — it creates a race to the bottom, where all ticket sellers feel like they have to advertise deceptively low fees or they'll lose out to those who do," said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. "It's not the kind of problem that can solve itself, because it requires all actors to behave well." Last year, the institute asked the Federal Trade Commission, which has the authority to crack down on misleading and deceptive business practices, to ban drip pricing. Its petition garnered support from a number of consumer rights groups and event ticket sellers.

In October, the Supreme Court will start swinging a conservative legal sledge hammer called the “major questions doctrine,” at every government sector that traffics in regulation. “The major questions doctrine didn't exist until fairly recently, but in the last year or so, the Supreme Court has made it a regular part of its anti-regulatory arsenal,” Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law School told the Washington Post last week. “As a result, I am sure that enterprising attorneys general for red states will use it to challenge climate regulations, environmental regulations and all kinds of other regulations.”