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Richard Revesz, the Biden administration’s nominee to run the White House regulatory review office, drew little direct opposition from Republican lawmakers at his Senate nomination hearing, even as several GOP senators expressed significant concern over the administration’s approach to environmental and other regulations. At the Sept. 29 hearing of the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, Revesz stressed that he would focus on transparency as well as even-handed cost-benefit analyses of agency rulemakings should he be confirmed as administrator of the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

President Biden’s pick for “the most important job in Washington that no one ever heard of” testified on Thursday, underscoring his support for cost-benefit analysis in the rulemaking process. He also told lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that if confirmed, he would lean into the effort to modernize regulatory reviews that the president launched upon coming into office. 

EPA got more than $40 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, including to implement the methane fee and stand up a national green bank. "EPA has never administered anything at this scale,” Michael Gergen, a Latham & Watkins LLP attorney, said on a recent Institute for Policy Integrity panel. “I assume folks at EPA are kind of freaking out about this.”

During his confirmation hearing Thursday, Richard Revesz addressed how the Supreme Court ruling on EPA's authority could affect federal rulemaking.

A Senate committee on Thursday will question environmental policy expert Richard Revesz, President Joe Biden's nominee to lead the White House regulatory office.

The White House has chosen a regulatory review chief who has spent decades analyzing the real-world impacts of executive rulemaking. Richard Revesz, who was nominated this month to head the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has published multiple volumes on how the government can measure the costs and benefits of its rulemakings. The New York University law professor and founder of the Institute for Policy Integrity also is an expert on environmental litigation — an important attribute given the role a conservative Supreme Court now plays in shaping regulatory policy.

There is “deep thinking going on in the community about what information needs to be before the agency” in light of the importance major questions took in West Virginia v. EPA, Earthjustice attorney Kirtki Datla told a Sept. 20 Institute for Policy Integrity event.

FERC's Willie Phillips joined the Institute for Policy Integrity to discuss a shifting U.S. energy landscape and how FERC is aiding the clean power transition.

FERC’s latest decision “should be the final nail in the MOPR’s coffin,” Sarah Ladin, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said in a statement Friday. “By rejecting the request to expand NYISO’s previous rule to the rest of the state, the commission closes a chapter on overly expansive rules that undermine state authority and harm wholesale market competition.”

Peggy Shepard, the co-chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), gave the administration a “D” grade on its high-profile efforts to elevate EJ throughout government decision-making. She told a New York University Institute for Policy Integrity event that the WHEJAC was able to, within the first three weeks of the new administration, put together 100 pages of recommendations, “and it took a year to get a response to this and the response was, in many cases, inadequate.”