Government Regulation Since Kennedy

The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 was amended in 1980 and charged each Federal agency with the affirmative responsibility for considering projects and programs that further the purposes of the NHPA and declared that the costs of preservation activities are eligible project costs in all undertakings conducted or assisted by a Federal agency. The 1992 amendments to the Act further strengthened the provisions - the head of each Federal agency must assume responsibility for the preservation of historic properties owned or controlled by the agency, establish a preservation program for the identification, evaluation, nomination to the National Register, and protection of historic properties, consult with the Secretary of the Interior (acting through the Director of the National Park Service) in establishing its preservation programs, and to the maximum extent feasible, each agency must use historic properties available to it in carrying out its responsibilities. The 1992 additions to the NHPA set out some specific benchmarks for preservation programs, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) created in 1978 and now under the Department of Homeland Security which was created in 2002.

Four social and environmental regulatory agencies were created due to the heightened attention to civil rights, environmental, and consumer issues of the 1960s and 1970s; they are the (1) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission created in 1964 by Johnson, (2) Environmental Protection Agency created in 1970 with Nixon, (3) Occupational Safety and Health Administration created in 1970 by Nixon, and (4) the Consumer Product Safety Commission created in 1972. A number of organizations were lobbying Congress for the rights of older Americans; this effort led to the 1965 creation of Medicare and Medicaid and the passage of the Older Americans Act. 

The Nixon Administration established in 1971 a little known review group in the White House called the "Quality of Life Review" program that focused solely on environmental regulations to minimize burdens on business. The reviews did not utilize analysis of the benefits and costs to society; the controversy from the program began a debate about both Presidential review of regulations and the use of benefit-cost analysis that would continue for two decades and to some extent continues today. Soon after Gerald Ford became President in 1974, he held an economic summit that included top industry leaders and economists to seek solutions to the stagflation and slow growth that the nation was then facing. Out of that summit came proposals to establish a new government agency in the Executive Office of the President, called the Council on Wage and Price Stability (CWPS), to monitor the inflationary actions of both the government and private sectors of the economy. It also led President Ford to issue Executive Order 11821, requiring government agencies to prepare inflation impact statements before they issued costly new regulations. The innovative aspect of the Ford program was the creation of a specific White House agency to review the inflationary actions, mainly regulations, of other government agencies. CWPS was staffed primarily by economists drawn from academia and had little authority beyond the influence of public criticism.

After President Carter came to office in 1977, the regulating agencies argued that the Executive Office of the President should not have a role in reviewing their regulations. On the other hand, the President's chief economic advisers argued that a centralized review program based on careful economic analysis was necessary to assure that regulatory burdens on the economy were properly considered and that the regulations that were issued were cost effective. Rapidly escalating inflation in 1978 convinced President Carter to act and in March of 1978, he issued Executive Order 12044, "Improving Government Regulations." It established general principles for agencies to follow when regulating and required regulatory analysis to be done for rules that "may have major economic consequences for the general economy, for individual industries, geographical regions or levels of government." President Carter also set up a new group, called the Regulatory Analysis Review Group with instructions to review up to ten of the most important regulations each year; it was chaired by the Council of Economic Advisors. It was said that because American capitalism proved too fluid and complex to lend itself to minute regulatory control as developed by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and industries under ICC supervision tended to stagnate because entrepreneurial opportunity was too constricted that it was not until the deregulation movement of the late 1980s and 1990s did some ICC regulated industries again become vibrant parts of the national economy, by which time the ICC itself had been abolished by Congress in 1995. In 1985, President Reagan issued Executive Order 12498, "Regulatory Planning Process," that further strengthened OMB's oversight role by extending it earlier into the regulatory development process. The Order required that agencies annually send OMB a detailed plan on all the significant rules that they had under development. OMB coordinated the plans with other interested agencies and could recommend modifications. It also compiled these detailed descriptions of the agencies' most important rules -- usually about 500 -- in one large volume called the Regulatory Program of the U.S. Government. No, I’m still not done.