While a vote on Susan Dudley's nomination to be the new White House regulatory czar has yet to be scheduled, it is rumored that the GOP majority on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will try to push a vote through in September.

If confirmed, Dudley would oversee and have the ability to curtail the important health, safety and environmental regulations she has spent much of her career opposing.

Susan Dudley's nomination to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House's Office of Management and Budget will likely face strong opposition from public interest, labor and environmental groups. Dudley has challenged regulation of industry in a number of areas and has publicly presented extremist positions on issues that will come before her as head of OIRA. Environmentalists have already begun to paint a picture of her as a danger to environmental and health concerns.

In response to the controversial nomination, OMB Watch has launched an online information and action center, Dudley Watch, to track the latest developments and provide analysis of Dudley's regulatory record. Visitors can find links to Dudley's scholarly work, analysis of Dudley's opinions on important regulatory developments and background on the Mercatus Center, the industry-funded think tank where Dudley served was head of regulatory policy from 2003 until her nomination this year.

Susan Dudley was nominated by the president in July to head OIRA, an office in the White House with broad power over federal regulatory policy, yet Dudley spent her time at the Mercatus Center opposing health, safety and environmental regulations. She has opposed lowering the threshold for arsenic in drinking water and closing loopholes in the Davis Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay locally prevailing wages and benefits on public works projects.

Dudley has utilized cost-benefit analysis as a weapon to undermine or kill regulations that industry opposes. She even claims that cost-benefit studies demonstrate that OSHA regulations - many of which are widely recognized as protecting the lives and safety of countless workers - have not had a "substantial impact."

Dudley applies the same logic to the public's right to know about toxic chemicals. According to her public interest comments, while it may be an "intuitively desirable social goal" to provide information to the public, it costs money and may even "confuse, rather than inform" the public. The costs must be outweighed by the social goal, explains Dudley, and even when this is the case it does not suggest that more information available to the public is in order.

Were Dudley to be confirmed as the next regulatory czar, she would likely review an EPA proposal that would undermine the Toxics Release Inventory, the premier right-to-know program about chemical information.

Dudley's championing of industry at times comes across as frighteningly naive. Arguing against regulation requiring air bags in vehicles, which have clearly been shown to save the lives of drivers and passages, she writes that, "if air bags save lives and consumers demand them," then the auto industry would have installed them without federal regulations.

In addition to her pro-industry work at the Mercatus Center, Dudley also once worked for OIRA, reviewing environmental regulations, and was widely criticized by environmental groups for her decisions there.