Biden Releases Fall 2023 Unified Agenda Of Federal Regulations

Since the early 1980s, federal departments and agencies have highlighted rulemaking priorities (not a complete inventory) in the (mostly) twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.

The Biden administration just released the Fall 2023 edition. The Agenda provides a snapshot of active and longer-term rules at various states of urgency moving through the pipeline, and presents a selection of rules recently finalized.

While traditionally prioritizing paperwork reduction, regulatory oversight and the balancing of costs and benefits, those pursuits have changed under Biden.

Biden’s Executive Order 14,094 on “Modernizing Regulatory Review” has shifted the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) emphasis from supervision to advancing “net benefits” as progressives see them. Where the Trump-era OMB boasted of successes in carrying out a (now-revoked) “one-in, two-out” approach to rulemaking, Biden’s OMB tends to affirm a series of top-down “whole-of-government” campaigns on climate change and energy policy, water, air quality, chemical regulation, transmission grid regulation, financial regulations related to climate disclosure, and more rather than challenge them.

Read the full article on Forbes.