WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has told federal agencies that they have until June 1 to propose any new regulations, a move intended to avoid the rush of rules issued by previous administrations on their way out the door.
The White House has also declared that it will generally not allow agencies to issue any final regulations after Nov. 1, nearly three months before President Bush relinquishes power.
While the White House called the deadlines “simply good government,” some legal specialists said the policy would ensure that rules the administration wanted to be part of Mr. Bush’s legacy would be less subject to being overturned by his successor. Moreover, they said, the deadlines could allow the administration to avoid thorny proposals that are likely to come up in the next few months, including environmental and safety rules that have been in the regulatory pipeline for years.
Many regulations do not take effect until 60 days after they have been issued, and a new president can try to postpone or revise them. After Mr. Bush took office in 2001, for example, he froze hundreds of pending regulations issued by the administration of Bill Clinton.
Mr. Clinton, in turn, had imposed a similar moratorium on last-minute regulations issued by the first President Bush.
Many officials in government agencies said they were caught unaware by the White House’s order, issued May 9.
Some officials described a flurry of activity as they sought to get proposals approved for publication in the Federal Register by June 1.
“There are good-government reasons to do what they are doing,” said Sally Katzen, the top regulatory aide to Mr. Clinton from 1993 to 1998. “But it has the added advantage of providing an excuse for not doing something they don’t want attributed to them, and for speeding up the things they want to lock in before the next administration.”
The highly unusual directive was outlined in a memorandum that Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, issued to agency heads without public announcement.
The government should “resist the historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months,” Mr. Bolten wrote. “We must recognize that the burden imposed by new regulations is cumulative and has a significant effect on all Americans.”
Mr. Bolten told agencies that the administration would make exceptions for rules that missed the deadline in “extraordinary circumstances,” which he did not define.
Still, the June 1 deadline to start the public comment process places at risk of delay scores of potential regulations, including protections for the environment and rules on workplace safety and public health.
Agency officials said it was impossible to speed up many proposals, some of which run for hundreds of pages, with three weeks’ notice. One official said his agency was resigned to the fact that some of its work would be delayed until the next administration, while another said he was hoping that the White House would exempt some proposals that missed the June 1 deadline but that were in line with the administration’s agenda.
Rick Melberth, the director of regulatory policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, predicted that the administration, in keeping with its longstanding skepticism about regulation, would make it a priority to complete rules that relax regulations on industrial pollution and other burdens on business.
Mr. Melberth also predicted that the administration would be willing to invoke the exception for “extraordinary circumstances” to allow rules that give businesses more flexibility than Mr. Bush’s successor might, especially if the next president is a Democrat.
“They get to define emergency,” Mr. Melberth said.
“On other things, they could do ‘Sorry, we can’t do anything on this’ ” because of the deadline, he added.
But the White House defended the order as a way to ensure that there will be adequate time for a careful and transparent review of any new regulations.
“We’re not shutting down work on important regulatory matters after June 1st,” a White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said in an e-mail message. “We’re just making clear that we will continue to embrace the thorough and high standards of the regulatory review process as we near the end of the administration.”
Mr. Bolten’s order will affect only potential rules controlled by the Bush administration. It does not apply to independent agencies or to pending regulations with deadlines imposed by federal statutes or court orders. The memorandum also does not prevent agencies from continuing work on potential rules that are not intended to be made final until after the next president takes office.
Still, the order places at risk of delay a host of pending regulations across the federal government that agencies have not yet formally proposed, including some backed by business interests.
The construction industry, for example, has been waiting for years for the Labor Department to issue updated safeguards to prevent crane accidents like the one in New York City on Friday. Industry and labor negotiators agreed to standards in 2004, but the administration has yet to issue them. Robert Weiss, the vice president of Cranes Inc., a provider of cranes in New York and a member of the negotiating committee that reached the agreement, said that the rule “could save many lives” but that he did not know how the White House memorandum might affect its prospects.
And Jeffrey Barach, vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said he feared that the deadline could jeopardize some rules that food manufacturers want. For example, the food industry has been pressing for more stringent requirements on farms to lower the risk that the food supply might be contaminated by crops that have been genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals. The Department of Agriculture is planning to issue such a proposed rule in June, too late for the deadline.
“If it doesn’t go through now, it will be delayed,” Mr. Barach said. “There is already, out in the field, developmental work on pharmaceutical crops, which is expected to increase. So any delay is of concern to us.”
Still, the administration’s efforts won praise from William L. Kovacs, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who said the memorandum was a “reasonable, sensible” effort to avoid so-called midnight rules.
“This is a gracious way of leaving office,” Mr. Kovacs said. “The White House is saying, ‘We will control the regulatory process so the next administration won’t end up with a lot of regulations being challenged in court in its first days in office.’ ”
But John D. Walke, director of the clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, denounced Mr. Bolten’s memorandum as intending to
“shut down regulation for the remainder of the Bush administration.”
“Until the bitter end,”Mr. Walke said,
“the administration will pursue deregulation on behalf of polluting industries and avoid regulation that would protect public health, welfare and the environment. This memo is a codification of that agenda.”
Still, some public-interest groups expressed ambivalence about the early deadlines. Several said they welcomed further delays in some long-sought regulations because they believed the next president, Republican or Democrat, might issue rules more favorable to their policy preferences.
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