Rolling Stone featured an in-depth examination of the sunset commission proposal that was recently promoted in the White House budget submission and reportedly will soon be the subject of a legislative proposal. Get the Rolling Stone story here or here. The reporter, Osha Davidson, also responded to reader questions over on Daily Kos and Booman Tribune. The continued conversations enabled by the internet and blogs allow us to have an even richer picture than we already got in the Rolling Stone feature, such as a glimpse at the material left on the cutting room floor. Some of the interesting tidbits:

• Arch-conservative activist Grover Norquist has been working behind the scenes to promote sunsets and other approaches to destroying the government's ability to protect the public: Tax reform is just one of Norquist’s goals. He is currently rallying his many troops to support President Bush’s efforts to partly privatize Social Security, which Norquist sees as a good first step toward total privatization, and, ultimately, to the end of “the Welfare State.” To Norquist, the sunset commission is another potentially promising route to the same goal. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo last September, Norquist explained that when the government is on its way out of the pension business (Social Security) and health care (Medicare and Medicaid), he plans to work to “reform” the EPA. (“Reform” is the preferred conservative euphemism for “cut” or “abolish.”) When I asked him recently which programs at the EPA he would eliminate, Norquist demurred. “Hell, I’m not an expert in the field,” he said. Norquist does, however, have a friend inside the Bush Administration who deals with the EPA on a nearly daily basis: John Graham, whom Bush appointed administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). . . . In 1995, Graham was part of the team, with Grover Norquist, that wrote the Contract With America. At the time, he was running the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which was largely funded by industry, and was accused of producing the results funders wanted.
• Graham has been counseling the kind of piecemeal approach to selling out the public's protection that we are seeing today: In 1996, the future “Regulatory Czar” told the audience at a forum hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, “I don’t think there’s any more passionate advocate of regulatory reform than myself.” Graham next outlined an incremental strategy for rolling back safety and health protections without attracting attention. Gingrich had over-reached with the anti-regulatory sections of the Contract with America and the package had blown up in his face, forcing him to step down as Speaker of the House, and making environmental, health and safety protections off limits to reformers. Graham counseled a slow, steady and highly disciplined campaign. “We build our own morale as a movement to work for larger and more ambitious regulatory reforms at a later time,” he said. Graham also cautioned against speaking too plainly about their goals in public, citing a meeting he had recently attended at which Vice-President Al Gore and EPA Administrator Carole Browner “named Congressmen in this town who had said they wanted to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Maybe we’re going to get to that some day, but I don’t think that's a helpful way to talk about these issues.”