The Clinton Regulatory Legacy

a 1993 executive order, similar to two Reagan orders that it replaced, requiring most proposed regulations to undergo economic and risk analyses. In 1996, the Office of Management and Budget issued more detailed guidelines on how to conduct those analyses, consistent with the Clinton order. Those measures would have provided an adequate basis for review of agency-proposed rules if the administration had consistently reinforced them. At the same time, several regulatory agencies pressed the limits of their statutory authority, with Clinton’s apparent approval. The Environmental Protection Agency (epa) sought authority to set pesticide standards without regard to their economic benefits. epa also wanted authority to set cancer-risk standards without a test of statistical significance. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha) issued draft guidelines on how to reduce violent crime in retail establishments that are open at night. osha justified that move by claiming that the “general duty” clause of its enabling legislation provides sufficient authority to issue the guidelines, even without promulgation of a formal regulation. The Food and Drug Administration used similar logic to justify its announcement of major restrictions on tobacco marketing, but a federal appeals court rejected that logic. The general lesson from those examples is that neither good executive guidance nor clear statutory language is sufficient to constrain an aggressive regulatory agency unless both the president and Congress reassert their joint authority to approve final rules. As many of the authors of the ensuing articles discuss, the Clinton record would have been much better if the administration had recognized that, more often than not, “smart” regulation means less regulation. As in other policy areas, Clinton’s regulatory legacy was one of casual administration and missed opportunities for reform. In the end, sadly, nothing so characterized the administration as the way it left office: issuing thousands of pages of costly regulations in its final hours. worse: Clinton’s health care plan of 1993 would have been the single largest expansion of regulatory authority since the New Deal. But the plan never reached a floor vote in a Congress controlled by Clinton’s own party. The ratification of the Kyoto global warming treaty and proposed tobacco legislation would have imposed similarly comprehensive regulation on the energy and tobacco industries, but Congress would not give approval to those efforts.