The Regulators: anonymous power brokers in American politics.

Dutil, Patrice A.

The Regulators: Anonymous Power Brokers in American Politics

By CINDY SKRZYCKI. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003. Pp. xiv, 247, bibliographical references, index.

Regulation has always been a core function of government and its administrators. With the advent of the new public management movement, many public managers and politicians focused their attention on this vital activity and new ideas and practices were adopted. Cindy Skrzycki, who writes a regular "The Regulators" column in The Washington Post, has been a keen observer of this phenomenon. For over twenty-five years, this Buffalo, New York, native has been writing about the relations between government and business on the battlefield of regulation. Her avid interest in this part of public administration is as unabashed as it is enthusiastic. "This is where the real work of government is done or avoided," she writes.

This book brings together columns of the last ten years and provides a convenient introduction for those who do not know her work. Her book essentially starts with the Republican agenda as outlined in the 1994 "Contract with America," which aimed at a regulatory revolution. It never happened, despite many attempts to cut off funding to agencies and the establishment of regulatory oversight by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996. The book is neatly divided into six chapters, each providing a mix of columns as they were published (with datelines), followed by updates, new insights and more elaborate discussion that puts some of the material in context. Each chapter closes with a clear summary and a note for readers who want "to learn more."

Skrzycki's book is timely because regulation studies are in disarray. Many scholarly pieces on environmental and energy regulation are written for obscure journals, for instance, but textbooks seem reluctant to delve into this essential policy and service activity. This is all the more ironic because, notwithstanding the politics and rhetoric of the past twenty years, governments and their proxies regulate more than ever. One indicator is the Federal Register, which since 1935 has compiled the federal government's regulations. In 1976, the page count for the register had reached 50,505; by 2000, it boasted 74,258. Over 130,000 people worked in regulatory agencies of the government of the United States in 2000. After 11 September 2001, and the various accounting scandals, the United States government has entered a new turbo-charged regulatory era.

The Regulators avoids the easy bean-counting of regulation. Skrzycki understands that regulation is not measured by the number of rules but by their quality. Her volume is a pleasure to read. It is informative about the relations between the regulatory administrations and their relations with Congress and the business community. She is not afraid to examine the technical debates over the sizes of the holes in Swiss cheese, the tea-testing expertise of the American government, and the politics surrounding the tread-separation problem in Firestone tires.

Her first chapter provides a thumbnail sketch of the history of regulation and then explains the "process" of regulation in Washington through the case study of battles to make the workplace more ergonomically comfortable.

The third chapter takes a look at "special interests" and their battles against regulations. Skrzycki focuses her attention on General Electric's campaign to derail the application of federal rules to its environmental pollution and documents its efforts to find allies in Congress. But she also looks at smaller industries and their efforts to avoid regulation. Skrzycki is careful to show that while the Republicans had a keen interest in regulatory reform, the people behind the Gore "reinvention of government" initiatives were also keen to see the government improve its performance in this critical area.

The fifth chapter examines efforts to document the cost of regulation, especially under John Graham, George W. Bush's appointee to OIRA (who has since left his post). The Bush administration ruled that when an agency produces regulations that will cost the economy more than $100 million annually, it is required to perform a cost-benefit analysis. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs would then review the agency's argument and determine whether the benefits of regulation justify the costs. The exception to the rule is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The office also launched a campaign to document the "paperwork burden" of complying with regulations. It calculated that in 2001, for example, 7.65 billion hours would have been spent filling out forms. In their search for meaningful performance measures, Washington has not been altogether successful. But, all the same, their efforts at trying to put some science into the process are laudable.

The final chapter quickly offers some thoughts on the future of regulation. Skrzycki does not seem hopeful that Washington can find a more effective way to regulate. She documents battles inside Congress and inside the Bush administration as both attempt to strike a balance between their obligation to protect the public good and the responsibility to ensure that the regulated are not driven out of business by the cost of compliance.

Patrice A. Dutil is with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada.