Some guy named Barack Obama showed up on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today, writing about the White House’s commitment to streamlining regulations:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.

Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.

This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It’s a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.

This is the second straight Administration that has committed to a goal of removing red tape and cleaning up the regulatory structure. Recall that Al Gore’s major goal was to shrink the bureaucracy and streamline federal operations. That’s basically all this would do as well. In fact, as you can see in the executive order, it expands on a regulatory review process started in September 1993, at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. The new EO just reinforces the requirements under the old EO:

(1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify); (2) tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations; (3) select, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity); (4) to the extent feasible, specify performance objectives, rather than specifying the behavior or manner of compliance that regulated entities must adopt; and (5) identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.

You have a Clintonite revival at the White House, and one of the first things they do is to re-implement a Clinton-era idea streamlining the bureaucracy. Man bites dog.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like much more than “regulators should do their job well” and “sometimes you have to clean out the attic.” It doesn’t mean the end of meaningful regulation (in fact, written into the EO is a requirement that agencies take into account “values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts,” which I think is great), it doesn’t end public comment phases of rulemaking (in fact, there will be much more public information revealed upon adoption of the EO), it doesn’t mean a radical change to how regulations will impact businesses (in fact, care will be taken to allow for flexibility for small businesses), it doesn’t do much of anything other than apply the principles of technocratic governance to the regulatory state.

You can, and Obama has, pulled out instances of overlapping or contradictory regulations, like the FDA allowing saccharin as a consumable product while the EPA considers it hazardous waste. But as Obama said, the EPA eliminated that rule last month, without the help of an executive order. Obama in his op-ed foregrounds the need for cost-benefit analyses and the ability to disclose rather than write rigid rules, but he says in the same breath that, based on the same cost-benefit analysis in place before the EO, the regulations put in place over the past two years far exceed the costs.

And so, this looks to be more of a PR strategy than anything else, a way to claim to Big Business that their needs are being met on regulations. Of course, the problem is their needs can never be met, since their desired end-state is no regulation for their core business. As Bill Black writes, this has a very real impact on job creation:

The new mantra of the Republican Party is the old mantra — regulation is a “job killer.” It is certainly possible to have regulations kill jobs, and when I was a financial regulator I was a leader in cutting away many dumb requirements. But we have just experienced the epic ability of the anti-regulators to kill well over ten million jobs. Why then is there not a single word from the new House leadership about investigations to determine how the anti-regulators did their damage? Why is there no plan to investigate the fields in which inadequate regulation most endangers jobs? While we’re at it, why not investigate the areas in which inadequate regulation allows firms to maim and kill. This column addresses only financial regulation.

Read the whole thing. I don’t think the problem of regulation over the past decade has been outdated rules or increased burden. It’s been regulators unwilling to do their jobs, and deregulators creating systemic risk by taking the cops off the beat. It’s possible that streamlining regulations will put the focus on the most important ones. But basically it creates an attitude that business is being crushed by onerous regulation and needs a break. That’s just not reality.