New OIRA head could be a force
President George W. Bush's first director of his White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Harvard professor John Graham, exercised an activist role in promoting better science in federal decision-making. President Obama's OIRA choice, another Harvard professor, Cas Sunstein, could do the same.
Graham directed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Sunstein has been on the faculty of the Harvard Law School and directs its Program of Risk Regulation. He taught earlier at the University of Chicago and is the author of a recent book, Nudge.
A devout liberal who writes for New Republic regularly, he also advocates some positions (judicial minimalism and support of such Bush nominees as now-Chief Justice John Roberts, among them) that have worried left-leaning environmentalists like Chris Mooney, author of the anti-Bush diatribe The Republican War on Science. Mooney admits he's impressed with Sunstein's intellect. "I'm interested to hear whether any environmentalists are going to be rattled by this choice. Sunstein is an ingenious scholar, and continues the whole "best and brightest" motif of the Obama administration...Important question: Will he roll back the Bush administration's overuse of the Data Quality Act?"
Good question. Our concern was that, after Graham’s departure, the Bush Administration failed to push the Data Quality Act far enough. But Sunstein is a believer in behavioral economics and its contention that the theoretical assumptions of law and economics should be modified by new empirical findings about how people actually behave. This might lead to the kind of confident assumption that government policy manifestos to change Americans’ diets will trump human physiology. Stay tuned.
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