The reporter, Osha Davidson, also responded to reader questions over on Daily Kos and Booman Tribune. The continued conversations enabled by the internet and blogs allow us to have an even richer picture than we already got in the Rolling Stone feature, such as a glimpse at the material left on the cutting room floor. Some of the interesting tidbits:

• Arch-conservative activist Grover Norquist has been working behind the scenes to promote sunsets and other approaches to destroying the government's ability to protect the public:

  Tax reform is just one of Norquist’s goals. He is currently rallying his many troops to support President Bush’s efforts to partly privatize Social Security, which Norquist sees as a good first step toward total privatization, and, ultimately, to the end of “the Welfare State.” To Norquist, the sunset commission is another potentially promising route to the same goal. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo last September, Norquist explained that when the government is on its way out of the pension business (Social Security) and health care (Medicare and Medicaid), he plans to work to “reform” the EPA. (“Reform” is the preferred conservative euphemism for “cut” or “abolish.”)

  When I asked him recently which programs at the EPA he would eliminate, Norquist demurred. “Hell, I’m not an expert in the field,” he said.

  Norquist does, however, have a friend inside the Bush Administration who deals with the EPA on a nearly daily basis: John Graham, whom Bush appointed administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). . . . In 1995, Graham was part of the team, with Grover Norquist, that wrote the Contract With America. At the time, he was running the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which was largely funded by industry, and was accused of producing the results funders wanted.

• Graham has been counseling the kind of piecemeal approach to selling out the public's protection that we are seeing today:

  In 1996, the future “Regulatory Czar” told the audience at a forum hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, “I don’t think there’s any more passionate advocate of regulatory reform than myself.” Graham next outlined an incremental strategy for rolling back safety and health protections without attracting attention. Gingrich had over-reached with the anti-regulatory sections of the Contract with America and the package had blown up in his face, forcing him to step down as Speaker of the House, and making environmental, health and safety protections off limits to reformers. Graham counseled a slow, steady and highly disciplined campaign. “We build our own morale as a movement to work for larger and more ambitious regulatory reforms at a later time,” he said. Graham also cautioned against speaking too plainly about their goals in public, citing a meeting he had recently attended at which Vice-President Al Gore and EPA Administrator Carole Browner “named Congressmen in this town who had said they wanted to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Maybe we’re going to get to that some day, but I don’t think that's a helpful way to talk about these issues.”

(1) The House and Senate finally, against all odds, passed a budget resolution. OMB Watch's budget and tax team has been staying on top of those developments from a budget policy perspective; what matters for regulatory policy is an ugly sneak attack masterminded by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) that will effectively make UMRA a roadblock to protections of the public interest. Alexander's amendment increases the UMRA point of order in the Senate from a simple majority to an insuperable supermajority.

(2) The House Small Business Committee held a hearing yesterday about the OMB hit list of regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated. OMB Watch was there with testimony to help the members see past the effort of corporate special interests and the administration to use small business as an excuse to weaken or eliminate protections of the public health and safety. The other witnesses used the occasion to repeat, like a mantra, their request for automatic regulatory sunsets.

We'll have more details in the next issue of The Watcher.

Posted by Robert Shull, 12:40:07 PM

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

As we just mentioned, the trend in the direction of performance measurement is creeping out beyond just OMB's PART system. New evidence: "Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo), chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, said he was looking into the possibility of requiring legislative agencies to follow the GPRA during a hearing yesterday on budget requests for the Library of Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO)." (Read more.)

If brown is the new black, performance is the new cost-benefit analysis: a highly technical measurement process that presumes to base subjective decisions on notionally neutral and objective data, while hiding in its very technical complexity the political volatilities that actually drive decisionmaking. At present, it is the dumber, less sophisticated cousin of CBA. As the practical policy applications of performance measurement increase, however, count on performance discourse to become as technically abstruse as CBA, thus making it ever more difficult to discern the political motives hidden in the numbers.

Posted by Robert Shull, 12:21:53 PM

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Take Action: Stop bill to put DHS above the law
The Sensenbrenner immigration bill has a provision that would empower Homeland Security to waive all law in the course of securing the borders. The House passed that bill; afraid that it cannot succeed on its own merits in the Senate, House GOP leaders attached that bill as a rider to the emergency supplemental spending bill for Iraq. The Senate is expected to begin work this week on the Iraq supplemental.

Take action today: tell the Senate to strip this provision from the Iraq supplemental.

Posted by Robert Shull, 10:57:15 AM

Friday, April 01, 2005

Not good, not good at all
Remember the Senate's version of the budget resolution, in which Sen. Lamar Alexander snuck in -- without debate -- a provision to increase the point of order under the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, thus threatening to throw a roadblock in the way of minimum wage, environmental protection, and other major protections of the public interest? Thinking at the time was that the gap between the Senate and House versions of the budget resolution, especially over Medicaid funding, was too wide for the chambers to reach agreement. Now National Journal's Congress Daily is reporting that the Senate and House GOP leaders have moved closer to agreement, with many thinking agreement is ultimately possible.

Posted by Robert Shull, 02:51:27 PM