The last regulatory policy hearing of a House Government Reform subcommittee was split into two disconnected halves, as committee Republicans considered the White House's policy of inviting industry to suggest rollbacks of regulatory protections while Democrats assailed the Environmental Protection Agency's pending rulemaking for mercury pollution. The final hearing this term of the Energy Policy, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform was marked by cheerleading from industry representatives of White House anti-regulatory policy, stonewalling from White House regulatory czar John Graham, and completely unrelated criticism from House Democrats and their witnesses of EPA's handling of its still-developing mercury policy. Committee Republicans focused in the Nov. 17 hearing on the White House's approach to regulatory policy -- in particular Graham's use of the annual report on the cumulative costs and benefits of regulation as a vehicle for soliciting suggestions from industry for a "hit list" of regulations to be rolled back or weakened. A succession of industry groups praised the process. All witnesses ignored the embarrassment of the 2001 hit list, in which Graham sent agencies a selection of "high priority" nominations to reform -- at least two of which Graham had prompted agencies to create just months before. Graham came under fire from Rep. Doug Ose (R-Cal.), who has consistently pushed an even more vigorously anti-regulatory position than Graham. After repeating an exchange from previous hearings -- Ose prodding Graham to identify the cost of all pre-existing regulations, and Graham demurring -- Ose pointed out that Graham failed to follow up on a specific request to submit a catalogue of all hit-list reform nominations from the current and previous regulatory accounting reports. Ose had requested that Graham list the individual nominations, identify which were screened out and which were forwarded to agencies, and chart their current status. In response, Graham simply declared that his office had not been given sufficient time to prepare a response. In fact, two agencies had been given the same request for reform nominations submitted to them, and those agencies were able to comply with the request. Although Graham could conceivably have asked other agencies to do the same and then simply supplemented their responses with information exclusively available to his office, he offered no excuse for failing to do so. Moreover, Graham specifically refused Ose's request for further information. Graham reminded Ose that his office is compiling information about the current hit-list solicitation for reforms to benefit the manufacturing sector in the final version of the annual regulatory accounting report, which will be published at the end of 2004. Graham declared that he would not release information about the hit list solicitation in advance of that final report, calling it "pre-decisional." Although pre-decisional information can be excluded from Freedom of Information Act requests, it is not clear how these outside communications from industry constitute pre-decisional information, nor is it clear why Graham would cite FOIA exemptions to justify refusing to give information to Congress in response to a specific request from the committee charged with overseeing his office. Committee Democrats, meanwhile, used the hearing not to line up witnesses with information that would counter industry cheerleading of the hit list project but, instead, to attack EPA's mishandling of pending mercury regulation. Compressed scheduling had ruled out a separate hearing on mercury, so the Democratic members essentially conducted their own one-sided hearing on mercury while the Republican members held a one-sided hearing on anti-regulatory policy.