This article has three sections, each of which deals with an Executive Order. The first section, “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Past,” emphasizes the critical role that Executive Orders played in the formation of OIRA. More specifically, OIRA owes its initial existence to the establishment of a centralized regulatory review system, the Quality of Life Review, which initiated Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review of environmental regulations through the issuance of a directive from OMB. Every subsequent President expanded OMBs powers through the issuance of Executive Orders which culminated in the Iconic Executive Order 12291. The section concludes with the recommendation that a select class of Executive Orders, and OMB Directives, be designated as “Iconic” by the National Archivist in consultation with the OIRA, and then given substantial deference by incoming Administrations. The second section, “OIRA Present,” describes an Executive Order issued during the Kennedy Administration which remains in effect but was promulgated prior to the establishment of OIRA and therefore recommends that a new Executive Order be issued which gives OIRA specific authority to participate in the conduct of interagency reviews of Executive Orders. The third section, “OIRA Future,” describes an Executive Order which implements a regulatory budget (RB) and institutionalizes a mechanism for controlling the size of the administrative state. This final section of the article recommends that the aforementioned Executive Order be reviewed and modified based upon the outcome of a request for public comments, and rules with demonstrated positive net benefits should no longer be accorded an automatic entitlement for issuance as a final rule absent their inclusion in an RB.

Jim Tozzi is a legend and a treasure. Who better to reflect upon the history of, the significance of, and the prospects for centralized regulatory review (CRR)?

Jim Tozzi is an activist institutional economist. During his 19-year career in the federal civil service, he was a pertinacious institution builder, armed with a PhD in economics but never flaunting it. He gained a reputation, richly deserved in my experience, as a supreme bureaucratic tactician. But he applied his skills to antibureaucratic purposes. Incessantly, and occasionally at professional risk, he promoted and protected internal executive-branch procedures that used economic analysis, and measures of administrative effectiveness, against the incessant forces of political entropy, agency parochialism, and special-interest capture.

Jim Tozzi has a wealth of knowledge and experience with cost-benefit analysis and centralized review of Executive Branch rulemaking. Mine is more limited, but nonetheless significant.1 And while I may agree with much of what he says in his article “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Past, Present and Future,” (Tozzi, 2019) I do see things differently than he does in a number of respects.

For decades, a strong case has been made for comprehensive reform of the U.S. federal government’s regulatory processes (for early contributions, see Weidenbaum & DeFina, 1978; Lave, 1981; Breyer, 1982; Harrison & Portney, 1983; Litan & Nordhaus, 1983; Viscusi, 1992; Breyer, 1993; Sunstein, 1996; Graham, 1996, 1997). Establishment of centralized Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oversight through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was an important achievement, but Congress has not yet passed comprehensive regulatory reform legislation.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Executive Office of the President coordinates the federal government’s regulatory agenda, reviews executive branch agencies’ draft regulations, and oversees government-wide information quality, peer review, privacy, and statistical policies. Remarkably, its regulatory oversight functions, and the benefit-cost framework underlying them, have not changed significantly through six very different presidential administrations. This article examines the evolution of executive regulatory oversight and analysis from the 1970s to today, exploring the reasons for its durability and whether the current imposition of a regulatory budget challenges the bipartisan nature of regulatory practice.

Jim Tozzi has for several decades been among the most dedicated and perceptive commentators on the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Indeed, Tozzi is arguably better suited than anyone to be the keeper of the OIRA flame: from his position in charge of the Office of Regulatory and Information Policy, OIRA’s predecessor organization, Tozzi contributed to the development of Executive Order (EO) 12291 and then stepped in as OIRA’s first Deputy Administrator. Since that time, he has been a steadfast defender of OIRA’s critical role in bringing rigorous analysis, quality control, and policy discipline to Executive Branch regulation. I share Tozzi’s view, and indeed that of all former OIRA officials I have spoken with, of OIRA’s importance to the regulatory state. Preservation of the strength and independence of the office is to me the principal criterion by which policy proposals that effect OIRA should be judged.

In 1992, Congress passed The Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act with the goal of “full restoration of The Elwha River Ecosystem and native anadromous fisheries.” As part of that act, the federal government was required to produce a benefit-cost analysis on dam removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, which was published in 1994. This article revisits that initial 1994 benefit-cost analysis; background on its methods and assumptions is given, comparisons are made to current state-of-the-art techniques in benefit-cost analysis, and an ex post benefit-cost analysis of the project is conducted for comparison purposes. We find that the cost and scope of the project exceeded original expectations, the cost of the foregone electricity generation was less than expected, and that anticipated recreational and fisheries benefits were both delayed, and lower, than expected. Furthermore, issues such as the value of hatchery-spawned versus wild anadromous fish seem not to have been anticipated in the original analysis, highlighting the fact that in doing an ex ante analysis, researchers must expect that unexpected factors may influence the ex post results of any project.

Various methods have been applied to evaluating the economic viability of public investments in tourism. In this article, we capitalize on the strengths of computable general equilibrium and cost-benefit analytical techniques and develop an integrated approach to evaluating public investments in tourism. We apply the approach to the evaluation of a US$6.25 million investment in tourism in Uruguay from the perspective of a multilateral development bank and a beneficiary government. These perspectives differ in a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) due to the timing of the costs incurred. The integrated approach is powerful in that it captures first and subsequent rounds of investment impacts of benefits and costs; resource diversion and constraints are accounted for, and the estimation of benefits is consistent with the welfare economics underpinnings of CBA.

Households in the USA spend about $70 billion annually on pets. Dogs, the most common pet, can be found in nearly half of American households. An important shadow price in the analysis of policies affecting human mortality is the value of statistical life (VSL), which is imputed from how people make decisions involving tradeoffs between small mortality risks and other goods. The value of statistical dog life (VSDL) is also an important, but until now unavailable, shadow price for use in regulation of such goods as pet foods and environmental toxins. Additionally, an estimate of the VSDL would have uses outside the regulatory process in valuing programs involving zooeyia, in setting tort awards for wrongful dog death, and in property divisions in divorce settlements where joint custody of dogs is not feasible. In order to estimate the VSDL, we conducted a contingent valuation of a national sample of dog owners that elicited willingness-to-pay for changes in mortality risk for pet dogs. Specifically, respondents were asked about willingness-to-pay for a vaccine that would reduce the risk of canine influenza. The design included both quantity (different magnitudes of risk reduction from the offered vaccine) and quality (differences in nature of death from the influenza) treatments as scope tests. It also included treatments involving spillover effects to other dogs and a priming question about disposable income. Based on the analysis and consideration of its assumptions, we recommend $10,000 as the VSDL.