Regulatory Policy/Rulemaking: President Extends Reg-Streamlining Directive to Independent Agencies

On July 11, President Obama issued an Executive Order that directs independent regulatory agencies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to take -- as Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein stated in his White House blog posting -- "new steps to ensure smart, cost-effective regulations, designed to promote economic growth and job creation." Similar to Executive Order 13563 of January 18, 2011, which was directed at executive agencies, this Executive Order directs independent regulatory agencies to "consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned." It also directs each independent regulatory agency, within 120 days of July 11, to "develop and release to the public a plan, consistent with law and reflecting its resources and regulatory priorities and processes, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives."