In the News

President Biden’s day-one presidential memorandum on "modernizing regulatory review" reasserts the importance of evidence, analysis, and expertise in regulatory decision-making. After a four-year long experiment in abandoning these norms of good governance, the Biden memorandum should comfort anyone who cares about cultivating a regulatory system that can improve the well-being of people in the United States.

On January 20, just hours after being sworn into office, President Joe Biden signed a presidential memorandum on modernizing regulatory review. This document embraces continuity on important components of the administrative state but, more importantly, it provides a significant blueprint for much-needed reform.

Experts at the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity agreed that the ‘censored science’ rule would have seriously constricted the EPA from considering important scientific evidence in a wide range of environmental rulemakings. In a statement, Richard Revesz, who directs the NYU institute, described the rule as ‘one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy’.

"The 'censored science' rule was one of the Trump administration's most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy," Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. "Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched."

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”

As the Biden administration seeks to undo the 'science transparency' rule, along with over 100 other environmental deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump administration, it can now make use of the most powerful tool in the arsenal: the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Now that Democrats control the House and Senate, they can deploy the tool more effectively and proceed even without Republican votes.

“It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, who was on Mr. Biden’s short list to run the E.P.A. “No one doubts the EPA’s authority to put these regulations on auto pollution back in place,” Mr. Revesz said. “But they can’t just make the Trump rules go away by executive order."

President Biden issued a sweeping executive order Wednesday to review former President Trump's environmental rollbacks across the federal government. "It is an unusually long list of regulations to be reviewed," said Richard Revesz, whose name has been floated as a potential White House regulatory chief. "The reason for the unusual length of this list is that no prior administration has ever taken so many actions that do so much harm to the health of the American people and the environment."

The Department of Health and Human Services' insidious new policy, known as the Sunset Rule, commits it to reassessing the economic impacts of almost every one of the department’s existing regulations and establishes an extreme penalty for noncompliance: If a regulation is not reviewed by its 10th anniversary, it simply blinks out of existence. HHS claims the power to repeal thousands of rules at once without so much as explaining what they do, much less justifying the harm that could arise in their absence.

Trump administration policies can be undone using the same aggressive techniques that the administration itself used. The primary tools that President Trump relied on, such as executive orders and guidance, do not make for permanent or durable U.S. policy. And many Trump-era regulations were poorly executed and supported, making it easier to undo those rules.