On April 10, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) co-hosted a two-day stakeholder session with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as part of its annual High Level Regulatory Cooperation Forum. The forum provides an opportunity for members of the business community to tell American and European officials how they would like the standards and safeguards that regulate their activities to be "harmonized." For the business community, "harmonization" is generally viewed as an opportunity to move to the lowest standards, or in the language of free trade, to remove or reduce "trade irritants." The exchange at the forum was between business and government; few public interest representatives were allowed to participate.

Just a year after enacting it, Congress and the president rolled back a key transparency provision of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act) instead of amending it to address concerns.

Recently disclosed documents show that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) weakened a proposed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food safety rule. During the regulatory review process, OIRA removed important safety testing requirements from the "preventative controls" rule, which were intended to prevent foodborne pathogens from entering the food supply. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. OIRA has a long track record of changing the draft rules it reviews, often weakening them to appease regulated entities. In this case, the public was made aware of the rule revisions only because FDA followed the requirement to disclose changes made during OIRA review.

Sequestration's automatic cuts to federal spending are beginning to sting in communities across the country, and two of the four major congressional budget plans put forth this year are at odds with public opinion on specific areas of public investments, according to a Center for Effective Government analysis. As the Pew Research Center found in a pre-sequestration poll in February, most Americans say they support maintaining or increasing funding for specific federal programs, including education, Social Security, and Medicare.