This is the Kado Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When independent federal agencies move forward with so-called major rules, those with big economic implications, they're supposed

to do so after a cost-benefit analysis. A seemingly small change to federal regulating from the

Office of Management and Budget promises to tighten the reins on agencies that might otherwise pretend that their rules won't have much of an impact, and there are instances right now where this rule will make a big difference.

Ike Brannon is co-author of a new article in Regulation magazine about the new rule.

The OMB issued a rule that requires independent agencies to submit cost benefit analyses

to OIRA, the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs for every major rule that they undertake.

They also require that it consult with OMB in the determination of whether or not a rule is major.

I think this is important for a couple of different reasons.

The first is that until this happened, most of these guys would cavalierly ignore any kind of cost benefit analysis. They would do whatever they saw fit and they didn't

feel compelled to run anything by the OMB. The second thing is when they were finally compelled to do a cost benefit analysis

from B a lot of times they would try to get around it.

This is what other agencies do too by basically pretending that a rule wasn't major.

They'd fiddle with the cost and all that and say, well, it's not really major, it's under $100 million.

And this is supposed to compel them to consult with OI or to determine whether or not a rule is in fact

significant. So it's closing down a couple of their avenues for avoiding regulatory scrutiny and I think this

is really going to have a lot of impact on how people do things.

Just for the clarity of people who don't follow regulatory stuff that closely when a rule is deemed to have, what is it,

a hundred and fifty million dollars in costs?

It should be a hundred fifty million if we adjusted for inflation but it's still

just 100 million dollars. Okay, so and if it has that amount of costs, a cost benefit study must be conducted on that regulatory rule.

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