Public Citizen and OMB Watch released a report today on Susan Dudley, the nominee to become the new regulatory czar within the Bush administration, concluding that she is unfit for Senate confirmation.

The report, The Cost is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections, presents a case for rejecting Dudley as the next regulatory czar, whose official title is Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House Office of Management and Budget.

As OIRA administrator, Dudley would have an enormous range of powers, including:

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• overseeing nearly all governmental regulations published by agencies,
• reviewing every agency action that would collect information from 10 or more people,
• setting policy that govern information dissemination by the agencies, and
• coordinating statistical policy.

OIRA not only checks for duplication in regulatory and information practices, its stated purpose, but can alter the content of agency actions. OIRA was created through the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980. The act does not grant OIRA any regulatory review authority. Instead, this authority was granted to OIRA initially through Executive Order 12291, issued by President Reagan within the first month of taking office. Thus, from the day it opened its door, OIRA was largely a regulatory review agency running roughshod over the agencies to promote the policies and priorities of the president. It has changed little over the years.

In a statement accompanying the report, Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, said that Dudley was "unfit" to be administrator of OIRA. She described Dudley's opposition to federal regulations to require air bags in automobiles as one example of her radically free-market ideas.

Margaret Seminario, Director of Safety and Health at the AFL-CIO, made the case that Dudley has a strong bias against regulation, a very dangerous position when it comes to protecting the lives of workers. Seminario added that Dudley's emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and the near determinative role that such economic analyses would have in Dudley's decisions run counter to various laws, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Act which places the safety of workers above cost-benefit decisions.

According to Robert Shull, the report's primary author--who recently left OMB Watch to lead Public Citizen's auto safety and regulatory policy division--Dudley:

• Has rarely met a rule that she likes. Dudley's "market failure" test would make it impossible for agencies to justify public health, safety, civil rights, environmental, or other public interest protections.
• Has a radical agenda for gutting federal regulations. She supports regulatory sunsets which would put agencies on a treadmill of having to revisit rulemakings that have previously been done, whether it deals with child consumer protections or broader health protections. She also supports regulatory budgets, a concept promoted since the Reagan administration, but opposed by Congress and the public.
• Is too cozy with industry. She has been the head of the industry-funded Mercatus Center, heavily influenced by major corporate interests. Even Dudley's conservative colleagues think she is a bit out there. According to the Public Citizen/OMB Watch report, the managing editor of a Cato Institute publication said, "The material that they send to us, they try to tone down. Cato is more of a public policy research organization. We may be a little more academic than they are."

It is unclear when hearings on the Dudley nomination will take place. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent out a press release calling for "stringent scrutiny" of Dudley. The chair of the committee, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), has not indicated a hearing date.