On September 2, President Joe Biden nominated NYU Law’s Dean Emeritus Richard Revesz, AnBryce Professor of Law, to be the next administrator of the US Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA, contained within the executive branch, reviews rules drafted by federal agencies and oversees the implementation of rules and regulations across the federal government.
A leading authority on environmental and regulatory law and policy, Revesz has written 10 books and around 80 articles on climate change and environmental policy as well as institutional contexts of regulatory policymaking. His most recent book, Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health (2020), co-authored with Michael Livermore ’06, argues for the importance of rigorous cost-benefit analysis in effective policy making, which they suggest has been neglected in recent years. Revesz and Livermore’s previous collaboration, Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (2008), asserts that progressive groups, which had traditionally eschewed the notion of cost-benefit analysis in federal regulation, had ceded the field to industry groups. That lack of participation, the book suggests, created an imbalance in political participation with repercussions for environmental, health, and safety protections.
Revesz has served since 2008 as director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank aiming to improve governmental decision-making through scholarly research in economics, law, and regulatory policy, with a primary focus on climate and energy policy. Since 2014, he has also served as the director of the American Law Institute, which works to clarify and improve US law. Revesz is a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former member of a panel on cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation within the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. He was NYU Law’s dean from 2002 to 2013.
If confirmed, Revesz would be the second member of the NYU Law community to be the OIRA administrator; Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence Sally Katzen served in that role from 1993 to 1998.
Posted September 6, 2022