Economic Report of the President

Advisers and other Presidential advisers have discussed the regulationwith the agency prior to its issuance but after the period forpublic comment has ended. The purpose has been to assure thePresident that the agency head, in making the final decision, has consideredthe full range of alternatives allowed by statute and has takencost-effectiveness criteria into account.The task of following the development of important regulationshas been made far easier by another innovation, the Regulatory Calendar.This list of important forthcoming regulations has become indispensableto understanding the cumulative impact of regulation onthe economy. The Regulatory Council, which publishes the Calendar,has increased the amount of crosscutting analysis in it and is also developingindustry-specific calendars. The first of these will catalog allFederal activities intended to affect the manufacture, sale, or use ofautomobiles. Through the use of the Calendar, the Council also seeksto identify overlapping regulations and tries to improve coordinationbetween agencies where overlap is inevitable.In addition to these regulatory oversight activities, there have beenspecial reviews of all of the significant regulations affecting a fewmajor industries. The most widely publicized of these were studies ofthe steel and auto industries conducted, respectively, by the EnvironmentalSubcommittee of the Steel Tripartite Committee and by aninteragency committee under the leadership of the Secretary ofTransportation. Another is the review of important regulations affectingthe nonferrous metals industry, announced by the RegulatoryCouncil in October. Special reviews of this kind are likely to becomemore common in the years ahead.Further Improvements in Regulatory Oversight ActivitiesThe oversight practices described above have been central to thisAdministration's effort to develop new techniques in an area wherethe proper relationship between centralized oversight and agencydecisionmaking is unclear and where analytical techniques requirefurther improvement. Both the relationship and the analytical toolswill be refined in the future.Formal consideration of the anticipated costs of any regulation isan obvious necessity. Our national resources are not infinite. Theremust be some determination of whether the anticipated costs arewithin our means and our willingness to pay. Moreover, it is clearlydesirable to maximize the benefits of any given level of regulation.Although the preceding statements may seem elementary, considerationof the anticipated costs of a regulation is sometimes prohibitedby statute. The Clean Air Act, for example, has recently been interpretedin court as prohibiting the Environmental Protection104