In January, the White House released an executive order updating guidelines for federal regulatory agencies. The new executive order increases the administration's hold on the rulemaking process by requiring a political appointee within each agency to approve all new regulations and White House review of agency guidance documents.

Guidance, in Washington speak, is an informal interpretation or clarification of existing policy -- including suggestions for best practices and technical descriptions -- that tells businesses how the agency plans to enforce the regulation. In tandem with the executive order, the White House's Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to agencies offering new best practices for agency guidance documents. OMB's "Good Guidance Practice Bulletin" would require internal review of significant guidance documents by senior agency officials, as well as notice and comment on guidance documents deemed "economically significant."

Together with the executive order, the bulletin extends the reach of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a little-known but powerful office of the White House, into an area of policy that had in the past been left up to experts within the agency. When the modern administrative structure of the U.S.
government was first created under the Administrative Procedures Act in 1946, the stringent requirements for promulgating regulation were not applied to agency guidance. Guidance from agencies was never intended to receive the same bureaucratic scrutiny as regulations because, for one, unlike regulations, guidance documents don't carry the force of law. [Am Prosp.]

This isn't bad simply because it opens the process up to political distortion, but because political appointees often lack expertise. I recently sat next to a Department of Energy political appointee whose experience for working on nuclear power was being a member of the Bush/Cheney reelection team. It's easier to reject regulations when you're both ideologically opposed to them in principle and don't actually understand the failures they're remedying.