OIRA’s hit list project is a back-door circumvention of an honest administrative process that invites corporate special interests to take an eraser to any regulations they don’t like – even if, or especially if, the rules are in place to protect the public health, safety, civil rights, or environment. As it has in the past, OIRA has opted to make this year’s report a vehicle for soliciting nominations for rollbacks of regulatory protections. Notionally, OIRA requests “nominations of promising regulatory reforms” limited only to the criteria of “reducing unnecessary costs, increasing effectiveness, enhancing competitiveness, reducing uncertainty, and increasing flexibility”—criteria which need not result exclusively in scale-backs of regulatory protections. In fact, it is possible that new, more stringent protections of the public health, safety, and environment could meet all those criteria by inducing firms to discover and implement improved efficiencies in operation. Still, OIRA positions its call for “reforms” after arguing that the “cumulative costs of regulation on the manufacturing sector are large compared to other sectors of the economy” and placing that argument “[i]n light of recent concerns about the health of manufacturing in the U.S.” (Draft Report 1). OIRA has thus made it quite clear that the only “reforms” truly sought are those that favor the manufacturing sector by rolling back the regulations that create vital protections for the public health, safety, and environment. This use of the annual report to build a hit list of safeguards is troubling, because OIRA has neither the right to compile the list nor the competence to do the right thing with it. OIRA lacks the authority to solicit a hit list of safeguards to be rolled back. Soliciting the hit list of regulatory protections to be rolled back or watered down is beyond the limited scope for the report that Congress authorized. OIRA is authorized by statute to report the costs and benefits of regulations and make recommendations, if necessary, to Congress on reforms to the network of regulatory protections. Congress did not, however, authorize OIRA to open up those protections to an industry free-for-all in which industry identifies its own targets for weakening or rolling back, and Congress definitely did not authorize OIRA to conduct its own series of follow-up actions prompting agencies to implement any hit list. This hit list project is an arrogation of power utterly without mandate or justification. Congress alone holds the power to regulate conduct harmful to the public interest. In certain complex areas, such as environmental protection and workplace safety, Congress has realized that sound protections require the consultation of experts, in-depth investigations of existing problems, comparisons of a wide array of options, and the participation of a broad cross-section of the public. In order to authorize action while allowing the finer points to be worked out over the time it takes for all these requirements to be fulfilled, Congress authorizes agencies to bring all these resources to bear in the issuance of regulations that give substance to broad statutory mandates. Short-circuiting the agency process to scale back the protections mandated by Congress is not a power OIRA has ever been granted. OIRA’s invitation to compile a new hit list disrupts a system that has been refined over decades. Members of the public seeking changes in regulation have always had two options: they can submit petitions for rule-making to regulatory agencies through 5 U.S.C. § 553(e), and they can always lobby Congress itself. There is a reason that these are the two options: Congress sets the ultimate protective agenda through federal law, and Congress in turn relies on agencies, which have the resources and expertise to unite public voices and scientific wisdom, to draw on those resources in setting their own sensibly balanced agendas for rule-making. OIRA is not merely providing a third alternative; it is disrupting a carefully constructed system that was developed over decades to balance competing public preferences and the insights of scientific experts in the development of important protections. OIRA’s economists, even with a handful of scientists to support them, lack both the agencies’ institutional competence to make sound judgments and Congress’s constitutional authority. OIRA lacks the competence to interfere with regulatory priorities. Experience has proven the wisdom of the system we have and the folly of the hit list project OIRA proposes. OIRA’s 2001 report solicited a hit list that resulted in one regulation being placed on a “high priority” list of rules to be rolled back—just months after OIRA itself had written the agency prompting it to create the rule. Rules were added to that “high priority” hit list with little or no justification, despite the sometimes years-long development of a record justifying the issuance of the rules in the first instance and even cost-benefit analyses that, within the controversial terms of “regulatory accounting” discourse, demonstrated net benefits. These inconsistencies only resolve into coherence with the contemplation of OIRA’s evident bias toward industry interests, with whom OIRA has contacts that it refuses to disclose to the public, and many of which are the same interests that supported OIRA director John Graham’s Center for Risk Analysis. Leaving agenda-setting to the agencies makes much more sense. The public health, safety, and environmental agencies routinely draw on experts and members of the public who have experienced first-hand the need for sensible safeguards, and some of their career staff members have worked in their fields for so long that they are experts in their own right. They know their issues with a depth and breadth that a handful of economists in OIRA cannot match. OIRA’s compilation of an anti-protection hit list and inevitable use of back-door pressure to have that list implemented will only interfere with the judgment of the professionals who have far more expertise to make such decisions.