Europe and the USA: The Uphill Quest for Regulatory Cooperation

From 2001 to 2006, I served President George W. Bush as his “regulatory czar” (a phrase coined by the New York Times ), a Senate-confirmed post known formally as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB). My job was to oversee the new regulations issued by the Cabinet departments, ensuring that adequate impact assessments (usually cost-benefit analyses) were performed to support proposals (Graham, 2008). But I was also given an intriguing assignment that is not typical for the OIRA Administrator: go to Europe and foster more regulatory cooperation between the European Union and the US federal government. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.