This week the Senate Budget Committee held another hearing titled “Moving to a Stronger Economy Through Regulatory Budgeting”. The hearing included three witnesses, including Dr. John Graham, former OIRA Administrator and present Dean of Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Dr. Jerry Ellig, Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University; and Prof. Robert Verchick, former deputy associate administrator at EPA, and presently law professor at Loyola University of New Orleans and also President of the Center for Progressive Reform. Their written testimony and a video of the hearing are available here .  Last June the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee held a joint hearing “to Account for True Cost of Regulation and Explore the Possibility of a Regulatory Budget”.

This topic was also addressed by a panel at the recent Fall Conference of the ABA Section of Administrative Law, titled “The Regulatory Budget Revisited”. The featured speakers included former Carter Administration OMB official Jim Tozzi; James Goodwin from the Center for Progressive Reform; and the current Chief Economist for the Senate Budget Committee, Bill Beach. An audio recording of the panel will become available on the Section’s website in upcoming months. I moderated the panel, whose title also tracked an essay I co-authored in the Administrative Law Review called “The Regulatory Budget Revisited”. That essay reviewed the history of the regulatory budget idea and called for it to be considered further. It is available in the Fall 2014 issue of ALR, and online at here.

*Jeff Rosen is the Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.