Obama Issues Memo on Federal-State Relationship; Intent Unclear

Last week, President Obama quietly issued a memo titled, “Administrative Flexibility, Lower Costs, and Better Results for State, Local, and Tribal Governments.” The memo directs the Office of Management and Budget to work with state and local entities to identify “unnecessary administrative, regulatory, and legislative burdens” in order to achieve “better outcomes at lower cost.”

It is unclear what Obama hopes to accomplish with the memo. The memo is at its most specific when it states:

[M]y Administration has heard from these governments that the array of rules and requirements imposed by various Federal programs and agencies may at times undermine their efforts to modernize and integrate program delivery. While appropriate data collection requirements are important to program accountability, some of these requirements are unduly burdensome, may not properly align compliance requirements with outcomes, are not synchronized across programs, and fail to give governments and taxpayers meaningful information about what works and what needs to be improved or be stopped. 

Beyond that, the memo is rather vague. It does create more busy work for agencies: “Within 180 days of the date of this memorandum, agencies shall take the following actions to identify regulatory and administrative requirements that can be streamlined, reduced, or eliminated, and to specify where and how increased flexibility could be provided to produce the same or better program outcomes at lower cost.”

That requirement comes on top of the mandate, contained in Obama’s Jan. 18 executive order, that agencies develop a plan, within 120 days, for reviewing existing regulations “that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome.”

The OMB director is required to provide further guidance to agencies within 60 days. Perhaps the guidance will clarify Obama’s intentions.

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