Continuing the rollbacks of environmental, health, and safety protections will be foremost on the congressional agenda if President Bush and congressional Republicans are re-elected in November, vows House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX). DeLay revealed that work is already underway on a "universal regulatory reform" package, according to a recent report in National Journal's CongressDaily, but no specific details of DeLay's plan were available. DeLay's threat comes at a time when other House Republicans have criticized the Bush administration for not going far enough in rolling back regulatory safeguards in favor of corporate and industrial interests. Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK) recently criticized the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for not eliminating any major regulations in the Bush years to date. At the same time, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) insisted that the OMB's estimates of the costs of regulation should be vastly increased above even the inflated estimates produced by regulated industry itself. Although no details of DeLay's threatened anti-regulatory package have yet emerged, there are recurring themes in these exchanges that could portend the next wave of attacks on public safeguards:

• Submerging cross-cutting regulatory attacks into the federal budget. At a recent hearing and in a follow-up letter, Rep. Doug Ose (R-CA) has raised the possibility of having OIRA's annual report on the costs and benefits of regulation integrated with the White House's budget papers. The rhetorical sleight-of-hand that bridges the gap between regulation and budget is a reframing of public safeguards as "off-budget costs." Such a strategy could effectively deflect public attention from attacks on widely-favored protections of the public health and environment by hiding them under the arcana of complicated budget issues.
• Forcing agencies into a "regulatory budget" straightjacket. Despite mounting criticism of the valuelessness of cost-benefit accounting for public safeguards, including evidence that the fundamental studies cited in favor of the enterprise lack academic integrity, Republican leaders still express an interest in building from cost-benefit measurement to a system of regulatory "budgeting." In such a system, agencies would be allotted a fictional budget account for regulations, and all efforts to protect the public health and safety would be measured for their "costs," which would be deducted from the finite "budget" until the "fund" is exhausted.
• Re-framing the assault on public health and safety as pro-jobs. The usual shibboleth for anti-regulatory advocates is that regulation is a drain on the economy. Proponents of DeLay's threatened rollback package are likely to exploit current anxieties about unemployment by re-framing regulations not as protections but instead as cost burdens that weigh down regulated industry. Most notably, they will try to exclude the role of global trade agreements from the discussion by shifting the blame solely to regulatory safeguards, even as they continue to bolster those same agreements. (The draft of OIRA's next report to Congress on costs and benefits of regulation, for example, invites nominations for rollbacks to benefit the manufacturing sector, citing "recent concerns about the health of manufacturing," but all such nominations must give "due consideration to fair and open trade policy objectives.")

Any new anti-regulation package will likely also attempt to resurrect elements of the failed anti-safeguard bill from the 1990s that was defeated in part by the efforts of Citizens for Sensible Safeguards.