President Bush Expands Influence Over Regulatory Agencies

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041307M.shtml

The Bush Administration's campaign for regulatory reform has now taken aim at guidance documents, a potpourri of messages from federal agencies that tell businesses how to implement regulations. A new directive from President Bush orders agencies to submit significant guidance documents for review by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It's uncertain how broadly OMB will interpret its new authority. Yet the directive set off a firestorm of alarm among environmental and public-health advocates, who say that an aggressive White House could impede or change agency guidance.

Executive Order 13422, issued by President Bush on January 18, 2007, is accompanied by OMB's Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices. These two documents boost White House control over a wide range of regulatory activities.

The new order fits this pattern that includes a draft bulletin proposing overhauls to agency risk assessments, issued in 2006, and the 2003 guidelines for agencies on how peer review of regulatory science should be conducted, critics say.

Beginning in July, federal agencies will have to prove the need for new regulations on the basis of specific failures of the free market, such as lack of competition preventing the provision of safe alternatives to toxic substances. Each agency head must designate a political appointee within the agency to control the writing of new rules.



Will there be anything worthwhile left of our country, military, or government by Jan. 20, 2009?

He's got less than two years to leave America as a chewed, charred corpse -- all in the name of *free enterprise*.