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February 2017

Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda

It is the policy of the United States to alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people.

Within 60 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency shall designate an agency official as its Regulatory Reform Officer (RRO). Each RRO shall oversee the implementation of regulatory reform initiatives and policies to ensure that agencies effectively carry out regulatory reforms. Each agency shall establish a Regulatory Reform Task Force. Each Regulatory Reform Task Force shall evaluate existing and make recommendations to the agency head regarding their repeal, replacement, or modification. At a minimum, each Regulatory Reform Task Force shall attempt to identify regulations that:

  1. eliminate jobs, or inhibit job creation;
  2. are outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective;
  3. impose costs that exceed benefits;
  4. create a serious inconsistency or otherwise interfere with regulatory reform initiatives and policies;
  5. are inconsistent with the requirements of section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act, 2001 (44 U.S.C. 3516 note), or the guidance issued pursuant to that provision, in particular those regulations that rely in whole or in part on data, information, or methods that are not publicly available or that are insufficiently transparent to meet the standard for reproducibility; or
  6. derive from or implement Executive Orders or other Presidential directives that have been subsequently rescinded or substantially modified.

The Trump White House’s press problems just keep getting worse

[Commentary] The message — if you are really bad at reading the signs — is that President Donald Trump and the people who support him believe they are at war with the media, plain and simple.

It's beyond an adversarial relationship. It's a desire on their part to extinguish what they believe to be the corporate-controlled, liberal media once and for all. From a political perspective, it makes sense for Trump to villainize the press, since the media is a stand-in for virtually everything that Trump supporters dislike about Washington specifically and “elites” more generally. But from a healthy democracy perspective, the attempts to change the rules — or turn the daily interactions between the president and the media into a game of favorites — is a very dangerous thing.

Sinclair May Be On The Wrong News Path

[Commentary] Sinclair is building a national TV news organization and there is a lot to like about that. Unfortunately, what's emerging is one with a conservative bent. If Sinclair wants to give its stations a push to the right that is certainly its prerogative, but I would hope it would not go that route. There is a better way. ABC, CBS and NBC are fine models — clear, concise, polished newscasts with minimal bias and NO commentary.

Pai's Privacy Ultimatum

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai believes that the best way to protect the online privacy of American consumers is through a comprehensive and uniform regulatory framework. All actors in the online space should be subject to the same rules, and the federal government shouldn’t favor one set of companies over another. Therefore, he has advocated returning to a technology-neutral privacy framework for the online world and harmonizing the FCC’s privacy rules for broadband providers with the Federal Trade Commission’s standards for others in the digital economy.

Unfortunately, one of the previous administration’s privacy rules that is scheduled to take effect on March 2 is not consistent with the FTC’s privacy standards. Therefore, Chairman Pai is seeking to act on a request to stay this rule before it takes effect on March 2. If Commissioners are willing to cast their votes by March 2, then the full Commission will decide the stay request. If not, then the Wireline Competition Bureau will stay that one element of the privacy rules pending a full Commission vote on the pending petitions for reconsideration consistent with past practice.

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