House Appropriations Committee spokesman John Scofield said lawmakers agree that performance-based budgeting is a good idea. However, he said Congress won’t likely give PART scores much weight as they make budget decisions.

“We always said PART can be one of the tools, but we rely on justification from agencies and won’t use PART to supplant that,” he said. “It’s nice to get a cute little number . . . but PART tends to be an excuse to cut Congress’ priorities.”

His replacement as acting administrator: John Morrall.

Learn more about Morrall's handiwork here:

• Anti-Regulatory Studies Found Deceptive

• Lisa Heinzerling, "Regulatory Costs of Mythic Proportions," 107 Yale L.J. 1981 (1997-98).

• Cost-benefit analysis: still so very wrong

On the heels of the Heinzerling article making the case against OIRA meddling from an admin law perspective, an article by Cardozo law prof Kevin Stack tackles OIRA meddling from a different starting point: statutory interpretation.

Here's a look:

In our constitutional system, the significance of the President's assertions of statutory powers should come as no surprise. The Constitution grants the President relatively few independent powers, at least in comparison to Congress. Yet presidents are held politically accountable for how the federal government as a whole functions, and in particular for how administrative agencies exercise their vast delegated powers. That combination--a dearth of independent constitutional powers and political pressure to utilize the bureaucracy effectively--provides strong incentives for presidents to claim that already-existing statutes authorize them to implement policy. Moreover, locating an existing statutory power as a basis for action saves the President the potentially costly and slow process of assembling a majority in Congress to enact legislation. . . .

With any grant of statutory authority, two different questions arise: First, what powers are given, and second, to whom? On this second question, a persisting strain of thought endorses the view that statutes granting powers to executive officials should be read to include the President as an implied recipient of those powers. . . .

This Article challenges the recurring claim that statutes conferring power on executive officials should be read to include the President as an implied recipient of authority. The initial thrust of the argument is to show that as a matter of statutory construction the President has directive authority--that is, the power to act directly under the statute or to bind the discretion of lower level officials--only when the statute expressly grants power to the President in name. It then traces the implications of this emphasis on express delegation for the treatment of the President by the courts, executive branch officials, and Congress, and defends the following claims: First, the President's constructions of delegated authority should be eligible for Chevron deference, but only when they follow from statutes that expressly grant power to the President; second, absent an independent source of constitutional authority, executive orders and other presidential directives legally bind lower level officials only when they are based on express delegations to the President; third, in view of the structural advantages the President as a unilateral actor has over Congress, these narrow constructions of the President's statutory powers provide an important constraint, internal to the executive branch, on presidential authority.

The Bush administration, senators, industrialists and farmers repeatedly invoke the term "sound science" to delay or deep-six policies they oppose and dismiss criticism of those they favor.

The administration has waved it at such diverse issues as global warming, beef imports, air pollution and arsenic in drinking water. Last Thursday, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta used the phrase to slow a congressional bid to raise the U.S. passenger vehicle mileage standard. "An administrative process based on sound science" should precede any change, Mineta said.

No one, however, is sure what "sound science" means.

The phrase has more to do with anti-regulatory lobbying than with laboratory results, said Donald Kennedy, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration and now the editor in chief of the influential magazine Science.

"Sound science is whatever somebody likes," Kennedy said. "It's essentially a politically useful term, but it doesn't have any normative meaning whatsoever. My science is sound science, and the science of my enemies is junk science."

The phrase has been on a roll since 1992, when lobbyists for the tobacco industry argued that no "sound science" showed that secondhand smoke is a health hazard.

Within a year, a group called "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition" - backed by the Philip Morris company - was invoking "sound science" to oppose not only tobacco curbs but also regulation of hazardous industrial chemicals such as dioxin.

In a 2002 speech to the National Economists Club in Washington, John Graham, who designed the Bush administration's initiative to vet proposed federal regulations, called "sound science" the basis of his agency's reviews.

Graham, then President Bush's administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said that would result in "a smart process (that) adopts new rules when market and local choices fail, modifies existing rules to make them more effective or less costly, and rescinds outmoded rules whose benefits no longer justify their costs."