When Modernizing Means Gutting

Or: Biden Is No "Moderate:" Part One of Too Many Already

It was a low bar, but still... Issues and Insights recently set a new standard in modern journalism by bothering to report a substantial, but unheralded political development: On the evening of his first day in office, Joe Biden quietly more than undid what we were constantly told to believe was one of Donald Trump's greatest "accomplishments" while he was in office:

The left would find it too constraining even having to wait for one of these before forcing us to act according to their whims... (Image by Alexander Andrews, via Unsplash, license.)

The order also seems harmless enough, going by the seemingly innocent title "Modernizing Regulatory Review." Except this order isn't about modernizing regulations. It's about unleashing the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.

Biden's order -- which didn't get released to the press until late in the evening of his first day -- aims to effectively toss the cost-benefit analysis that for many decades has served as at least a modest brake on the ambitions of regulators. In the past, regulations where the cost of compliance far exceeded the benefits could be stymied by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Biden wants the review process instead to be "a tool to affirmatively promote regulations" and "to ensure swift and effective federal action" on everything from the pandemic, to the economy, to racial inequality, to the "undeniable reality and accelerating threat of climate change." In other words ... everything. [bold added]

The folks at I&I say, "We told you so," but I must have missed their making the case for ending the regulatory state, or at least revisiting the Emergency Powers Law.

Indeed, while Trump was using the "phone and pen" Obama left him, few conservatives seemed bothered by the obvious probability of a President from the other party getting elected and doing exactly what Biden just did: Undoing this minor trimming of the regulatory state by executive fiat.

I'd considered quoting myself on this, but a blog post I'd pointed to says it better, so here we go:

Look for the next Democratic president to enact a wide array of socialist policies using emergency executive authority. She [sic] may try to pack the Supreme Court. Republicans who got hysterical over Clinton and Obama will then long for the "good old days" of constitutionally restrained Democratic presidents.

Our search has been over for some time already.

I will leave with only one more thought for now. As dim a view as I have of the government running cost-benefit analyses (CBA), throwing out that requirement reminds me of something I learned from Don Watkins's excellent course on persuasion mastery. In a couple of instances, Watkins notes that one of the methods of persuasion employed in what he calls the anti-freedom framework involves misrepresenting policy options in general, including by presenting fantasies as if they are actual policy options.

Without even CBA, we now face the specter of left-wing fantasies being implemented as policies by the regulatory state.

I did not go far enough when I complained about Trump's piecemeal and random "deregulation" as being easily overturned. Nor when I said Republicans should at least argue against the regulatory state. Even I couldn't have imagined something this insane popping up so fast.

The President was already too powerful as it was...

-- CAV