The late Rep. John Dingell, the formidable Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is known for saying, “If you let me write the procedure and I let you write the substance, I’ll beat you every time.”
Conservative think tanks caught on to this maxim 30 years ago, and the movement’s generous funders work with them to shape the public perception of federal rules. They laid the foundation that allowed President Donald Trump to gut or eliminate many federal regulations, or prevent agencies from even trying to develop them. Many journalists struggled to keep up with the damage.
As the pandemic has exposed what happens when rules don’t protect nurses and doctors or establish safety procedures for meat-packing plants, the public’s recognition of the value of regulation may be evolving.
If that’s so, one small progressive think tank — the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) — is ready to inform and amplify the progressive discussion of rulemaking not only on Capitol Hill but also in states and localities.
CPR is rich in intellectual firepower, its founders and staff say. But as the progressive counterweight to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — CPR could use something that conservative think tanks appear to have in abundance: money.
CPR has been the go-to think tank for progressives for the past 18 years. It was virtual, long before virtual was cool, and that’s helped it survive with a budget of under a million dollars a year, says board president Robert Verchick.
It’s also been blessed with a lot of pro-bono expertise, “60 of the very best legal advocates in the country,” Verchick brags. These scholars often have worked on Capitol Hill, and for Democratic administrations, and come from some of the nation’s best law schools. Yet, they donate their time and talent to CPR. Verchick himself is an environmental law professor at Loyola University, New Orleans. He also held a senior policy position in the Obama Environmental Protection Agency.
All that intellectual heft supports CPR’s nine paid staffers as they help their progressive allies develop a strategy to undo some of the damage of the Trump years. But it’s tricky, says senior policy analyst James Goodwin.
Goodwin is an expert on an obscure law, the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress the power to undo some regulations implemented by an administration during its final months in power.
Trump went to town undoing a number of Obama regulations after his victory in 2016, and progressives are aching to do the same thing.
But Goodwin has been cautioning them to be realistic and careful. Don’t bother with rules that are so “preposterous” the courts will throw them out, he advises. And keep in mind that the CRA has a quirky provision: If Congress throws out a rule using the CRA, an agency can’t bring up a rule that is in “substantially the same form” ever again. The other, more daunting, obstacle is the fact that unless Democrats win two Senate elections in Georgia in January, it will likely be impossible to undo any Trump rule using the CRA.
In the event that Democrats gain a Senate majority, Goodwin says that the rules that should be targeted should be utterly bad ideas, like the rule that would block the EPA from using certain types of scientific information — such as public health data — to inform its regulations.
Goodwin is used to helping the think tank’s allies in the environmental, public health, and consumer protection world. But last summer, he started getting calls from other groups — immigration advocates, and those working on LGBTQ issues.
These reformers, too, had felt the sting of Trump’s regulations, he says. The fact that they sought CPR out for help, shows the think tank’s “unique value” to the progressive community.
While progressives are trying to influence who gets plum jobs in a new Democratic administration, CRP is focused on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OIRA does not make many headlines, but it’s a crucial conduit between the White House and federal agencies Verchick explains.
Just because agency staff work for the president, doesn’t mean that even a pro-environment White House will love every regulatory proposal that EPA staff come up with, he says. White House staff may raise questions about how a clean water rule may affect the president’s jobs agenda, or worry how key members of Congress will react.
That type of give-and-take between agencies and the executive branch should be part of the public record, Verchick says. Transparency at OIRA was something CPR advocated for long before Trump came into office.
How does CPR get its message to the right people? Its scholars testify before Congress, often at the request of Democratic members.
CPR also helps House and Senate staffers as they try to assess complex regulatory proposals, Goodwin adds, and has a reputation on the Hill for “being reliable, quick, accurate.”
While having their thoughts make the opinion page of The New York Times may be “super,” Verchick says that CPR scholars often try to be published in local papers, in red as well as blue states. Their op-eds make their way into decidedly non-scholarly media outlets such as the Southern Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Waco Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun “because we're interested in how we might affect the debate in a way that has real influence,” he says.
And that op-ed strategy plays to another of CPR’s strengths — its willingness to get its hands dirty — working in the field with grassroots groups to understand their problems and to collaborate with them on solutions that involve the regulatory process.
CPR staff and scholars have been actively collaborating with groups working on water quality in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, on toxic flooding in Virginia, and on adapting to climate change in Southern Louisiana, Verchick says. These activities can secure donor and foundation funds. “Donors are interested in addressing problems that real people have and involving real people in developing ... solutions," Verchik notes.
This engagement with average Americans has led CPR to develop an even bigger progressive vision for the future. CPR wants to radically transform the way the federal government makes rules — focusing the process on the needs of people, not corporate special interests, says Goodwin.
But truly involving average Americans in the process would be “ridiculously expensive,” Goodwin concedes. It would involve outreach to citizens across the country, and hiring people to connect with underrepresented communities and explain how they could participate in rulemaking.
Including the “lived experience” of Americans, Goodwin adds, is crucial, “because ultimately, that’s what the regulatory system is all about — solving people’s problems.”
This notion of people-centered rulemaking will not happen overnight, regardless of the political party in charge, he acknowledges. But over time, as it becomes part of the conversation on regulation, it would gain traction.
Conservative donors, Goodwin observed, are willing to support think tanks promoting theories that take decades to become mainstream and subsequently implemented. For example, since the Reagan era, he said, conservatives have been pushing for a “regulatory budget” — arguing that since rules cost businesses time and money, and are a drag on the economy, there should be a limit on how many rules an agency could propose. That idea has gained political support, despite the fact that it could block an agency’s power to respond to emerging dangers like climate change. In 2017, it became the centerpiece of a Trump executive order requiring that for each new rule an agency proposes, it must find two existing rules to eliminate.
But CPR has found it difficult to get similar buy-in from progressive foundations, Verchick says. “A lot of foundation money, not surprisingly, is directed toward specific initiatives,” like CPR’s work in Virginia or advising on worker safety at poultry processing plants. “But we also obviously need funding that’s unrestricted,” he says, so that CPR can promote its larger message that people should be “at the center of regulations.”
Even if foundations have been reluctant to give that type of support, Verchick says he’s hoping that he can recruit more individual donors. But that effort, he says, will take a different approach, spending more time explaining “how we see the world from the regulatory point of view ... talking about our theory of change.”
“If we had a larger budget, if we were able to build a larger footprint, which is what we’re hoping to do over the next few years, we would be able to connect people with their own government in meaningful ways,” he says.
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