The Obscure—But Crucial—Rules the Trump Administration Has Sought to Corrupt
In January 1981, I was a few years out of law school and a career government lawyer—that is, not a political appointee. Although I had been (and still am) a lifelong Democrat, fate and the Reagan administration had conspired to hand me a dream professional assignment: I had joined the legal team as a junior member providing advice on the development of the most significant institutional innovation in federal administrative rule making of the past half century—an innovation the Trump administration has since corrupted in important ways. Senators today have a rare chance to expose how and why.
But before we get there, let’s start at the beginning. In the late fall of 1980, the general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had recruited me from my Justice Department post to assist in the new administration’s drafting and review of executive orders. My job would not be to formulate policy. The task was instead to review proposed presidential orders to help ensure, along with my Justice Department counterparts, that the incoming president was staying within legal bounds in his new projects.
The most important of the initiatives I helped to process was an with the modest title of “Federal Regulation.” Earlier presidents—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—had each implemented different systems to intensify White House oversight of the administrative rules issued by executive agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of
