There has been a multi-stage reaction from Wall Street to the prospect of financial regulation, ever since the crash necessitated the need for the political class to act like they were doing something to rein in the financial sector. First the banks tried to water down the legislation which eventually became Dodd-Frank. Then they used [...]

Spurned VP candidate Rob Portman has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that the Obama Administration has delayed regulations from taking effect until after the 2012 elections, when the hellfire will come down and the jackbooted thugs at the EPA will force us to stop using our smart phones and eat [...]

Just to show what a bullet we may potentially dodge with Cass Sunstein out of government, consider this postscript to his career: The outgoing White House regulations chief circulated industry attacks on proposed smog standards among high-level advisers to President Obama, emails released to The Hill through a FOIA request show. Cass Sunstein, the regulatory [...]

Regardless of what happens in November, we are guaranteed to have a much more functional federal government in the near future. That’s because Cass Sunstein is taking his boot off the neck of the federal regulatory state and leaving government. I couldn’t be happier. Cass Sunstein, a top adviser to President Obama who functions as [...]

I mentioned earlier today that the President issued an executive order to create an interagency working group to oversee hydraulic fracturing, the process used in extracting natural gas. This order creates no regulations on fracking on federal lands, or on the development of environmental and public health standards associated with fracking generally. It just coordinates [...]

Gardiner Harris paints a very one-sided picture of an FDA desiring to use its regulatory power and a White House dedicated to constraining them. When you look at the results, however, either some FDA officials are trying to tell their side of the story, or the article is dead-on about the White House’s love affair [...]

NPR pulled back the curtain yesterday on OIRA, the backwater office of regulatory affairs that holds an effective veto over any regulations promulgated by the Administration. The report found that throughout the Obama Administration, the office has altered more regulations coming to them from federal agencies than the Bush Administration ever did. There are a [...]

In my previous item I mentioned that new regulations to improve the nation’s food safety were threatened by funding cuts. But the candle is being burned at both ends. While regulatory agencies struggle to carry out their mandates with underfunded budgets, the mandates themselves are being curtailed by a White House-led effort to trim regulations. [...]

Yesterday definitely felt like a kickoff to House Republicans using the committee hearing process for their own ends. I wrote about the hearing in the Oversight Committee, where Darrell Issa tackled TARP and the foreclosure crisis. Issa stumbled a bit trying to say that banks should be broken up, but also, not: “I’m not for [...]