Obama Makes Cass Sunstein Administration's Regulatory Czar

The Wall Street Journal's JONATHAN WEISMAN and JESS BRAVIN report that: "Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who pioneered efforts to design regulation around the ways people behave, will be named the Obama administration's regulatory czar, a transition official said Wednesday. Mr. Sunstein, a friend of President-elect Barack Obama from their faculty days at the University of Chicago law school, will mark a sharp departure for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Although obscure, the post wields outsize power. It oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama aides have said the job will be crucial as the new administration overhauls financial-services regulations, attempts to pass universal health care and tries to forge a new approach to controlling emissions of greenhouse gases." The Bush Administration had filled the post for the past eight years with officials who used the office to install deregulatory practices throughout the government. The reporters explain that: "Activists saw it as the place where environmental, workplace safety, consumer products and other areas of regulation often stalled or died." Mr Sunstein will bring a swift reassessment of Bush priorities for deregulation to the office he will occupy and is expected to quickly employ a number of his own innovative practices to help shape the focus of government. The reporters provide additional background information on "Mr. Sunstein, a prolific academic with wide-ranging interests, may be best known for advancing a field known as "law and behavioral economics" that seeks to shape law and policy around the way research shows people actually behave. The theory builds on earlier approaches developed at the University of Chicago law school that sought to harmonize regulatory law with free-market economics. Although widely embraced by conservatives, critics said it failed to account for the sometimes less-than-rational aspects of human behavior. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Mr. Sunstein said Mr. Obama was intrigued by "law and behavioral economics" as an approach to regulation that would avoid ideological extremes. Mr. Obama believes in "doing law in a way that's realistically based on human behavior," Mr. Sunstein said. "He's a University of Chicago Democrat, so he's very attuned to the virtue of free markets and the risks of free-market regulation. He's not an old-style Democrat who's excited about regulations" for their own sake. Mr. Sunstein said the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides money to the working poor, was "a way of lifting people out of poverty" superior to old-style welfare payments." Mr. Sunstein brings an innovative, non-ideological approach to government that should be welcomed and provides opportunities for significant improvements in the manner that government is run.