Rewiring Regulation: Regulatory Review for a New Political Economy

Introduction

In recent years, the executive branch has become an increasingly central focus for policymaking on both the left and the right. Among progressive advocates, there has been a growing attention to how executive action might help advance progressive priorities, from climate to racial and gender equity to imbalances of economic power, and more. But the ability of executive branch agencies to conceptualize, design, and implement effective public policy is shaped enormously by the back-end processes and systems by which these agencies structure their policymaking. What data and participatory measures, if any, are agencies employing to develop their proposals? What is the process for White House review and approval of these new policies? How are the policies implemented—whether through rulemaking, adjudicatory enforcement, or other mechanisms? While there has been an important and valuable shift in recent years to orient progressive economic policy more explicitly around structural inequities—from taking on questions of racial, gender, and economic inequity to experimenting with the affirmative role of government in proactively shaping markets and economic systems—the success of these conceptual shifts requires a parallel shift in intra-agency protocols and procedures to convert these broad principles into actionable policies. 

This brief focuses on the ways in which reforms to the internal management of executive branch policymaking might enable policies that are better oriented toward structural inequities and more effectively implemented. These internal processes—from the process of regulatory review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to the ways in which policy development is coordinated by the Executive Office of the President (EOP)—can shape how problems are conceptualized and analyzed, how policies are designed, and through what mechanisms solutions are implemented. To explore this question, this brief identifies and describes several governance process reforms developed during the Biden administration and draws out some broader lessons and implications of these developments.¹ 

These new executive branch policies drove several notable new policy changes that had some immediate impact. For example, the executive order on competition (EO 14036) included a list of over 70 regulatory actions, many of which have been applied and have had major impacts on communities. This includes, for example, the recent FDA rule on hearing aids, which brought much-needed competition to the market, lowering prices and increasing consumer access to the devices (FDA 2022). Similarly, efforts to center racial justice and disadvantaged communities in infrastructure and climate investments have helped channel resources to some of the most vulnerable places in the country. But for many of the reforms discussed below, the impact is more long-term and subtle. These reforms change the ways in which policies are conceptualized, the processes through which they are developed, and the broader organizational culture in which policy ideas ferment and ripen within the executive branch. The long-term implications of these changes are yet to be fully realized—they are still only a few years old at this point. But they are important to take stock of so that we can continue to evaluate their efficacy in the coming years. 

The interventions that were deployed from 2021 to 2024 provide insights into how movements might push for these kinds of hidden-from-view but still important institutional changes going forward. The rise of significant external pressure from constituencies in previous years, culminating in the tremendous movement demands for action on climate change, racial justice, and economic inequality in 2020, set an urgent agenda for the incoming Biden administration. Parallel developments among policy experts, including research and state-level experiments on many of these questions, offered some off-the-shelf ways to adapt to these demands. The reforms themselves in turn created internal procedures, guidance, and permission to engage more deeply on themes of economic power and racial inequity. And these reforms also created more points of input, leverage, and collaboration between policymakers and movements—from the equity process to the new analytic focus on distributional analysis to the opening of new participatory channels. 

This is not to say that these process reforms are sufficient on their own, but it does suggest new approaches to continue going forward and future possibilities for redesigning the governance machinery. 

Footnotes and Suggested Citation

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