Procurement Rules Getting In Way of FCC’s Auction Efforts, Economist Says
Government procurement rules are stymieing the FCC’s efforts to build an auctions program, Commission economist Evan Kwerel said Monday. “We've been trying for a year to get some auction experts,” Kwerel said, but contracting and procurement rules “are nothing but an obstacle to good policy.” Kwerel spoke in a question and answer session at Georgetown Law Center after a speech by Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s top regulatory adviser. Sunstein had given a round-up of the administration’s efforts to eliminate overly burdensome regulations.
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Kwerel, an almost three-decade veteran at the commission, said he was “extraordinarily skeptical” of Sunstein’s cost-benefit approach to regulation. The focus of the White House’s reform efforts ought to be “getting the right people in the right places” and “getting more creative people in government,” said Kwerel, who has worked on incentive auctions for the commission since 1993. Last month, Kwerel urged Congress to give the commission “a lot of flexibility” so the rulemaking would be “collaborative … to get the best design that meets the objectives that Congress sets for us” (CD May 24 p7). A commission spokesman didn’t respond to our requests for clarification on Kwerel’s remarks.
But Sunstein said Obama’s January executive order has already saved hundreds of millions of dollars and plenty of hours by getting rid of redundant or downright silly regulations. He cited a long Washington tradition of treating milk the same as oil because statutory language describing oil matched milk’s description. The EPA recently created an exemption for dairy farmers under Obama’s executive order, Sunstein said. “There’s a need to change the regulatory culture in Washington,” said Sunstein, the president’s longtime friend and former colleague at the University of Chicago’s law school.
The cultural change doesn’t just cut against regulation, though, Sunstein added. He said he wanted to correct the impression -- an impression he himself had spread -- that expert agencies’ rulemaking processes were just “kabuki theater.” That is “ludicrously false,” he said. He said agencies: (1) should have access (and share access) to the latest scientific information and act in advance of rulemakings to talk to people directly affected by proposed rules; (2) should take steps to “harmonize” competing regulations; (3) should use “the best available technology to quantify” data and decisions; and (4) should identify “flexible burdens” that preserve “freedom of choice for the public.”
Randolph May of the Free State Foundation said he looked at the administration’s concern over regulation with jaundiced eyes. “I am afraid they wouldn’t be nearly as serious about regulatory reform if the House had not flipped,” May told us.