A Bloomberg News story last week on how the folks who oversee the regulators are overmatched these days raises a question: What’s a regulator?
Here’s the lede (emphasis mine)
As the U.S. government’s regulatory bureaucracy has ballooned, one agency has been left behind: the office that oversees the regulators.
The regulatory bureaucracy has ballooned? That doesn’t sound right. The federal workforce, after all, is down over the last forty-plus years, and places like OSHA are shadows of their former selves.
Bloomberg gives us its numbers in the next paragraph:
The number of people working in federal agencies with regulatory authority has doubled to about 292,000 under both Republican and Democratic administrations during the past 30 years. In the same period, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House bureau that reviews most major rules, has shrunk to 45 employees from 90, according to data compiled by researchers at George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis.
Have regulators, as Bloomberg seems to be saying, doubled in the last thirty years, adding 145,000 jobs? That depends on whether you think these guys are regulators:
To see why, look at the research Bloomberg cites (click to enlarge; highlights are mine):
More than 83 percent of the new regulatory-agency jobs since 1980 came in the Department of Homeland Security, and almost all of those DHS jobs were created after 2000. That spike came when the Bush administration and Congress federalized private airport security in the wake of the catastrophic failure on 9/11. The Transportation Security Administration accounts for 60,000 of those 145,000 new regulatory jobs. Meantime, ramped-up border security—most of it since 9/11, accounts for another 61,000.
Quasi-defense jobs are hardly what most people think about when they talk about regulators. And Bloomberg’s story is about who oversees the rulemakers, not the guy checking your driver’s license at LAX.
So what do those regulatory staff number since 1980 look like sans DHS?
Without Homeland Security, regulatory staff has increased 16 percent since 1980, which is well below the 37 percent growth rate of the overall population.
Bloomberg isn’t technically wrong. But it should have given readers more context on its numbers.
There's an srgument to be made that the amount of regulators should be proportional to the size of the activity they regulate.
If we want to look at it from a crude GDP standpoint, GDP in dollar amount has increased by a factor of 4 while inflation has eroded a factor of 1.73 of value. By that measure there should be about 2 times the regulators we had in 1980.
But where should the regulatory growth have occurred? The finance industry has blown up while manufacturing has stagnated, the service industry has increased while unions have faltered, the amount of consumer finance contracts (insurance, credit) has swelled while the amount of consumer savings has been eaten up.
Perhaps we need more finance oversight (by regulators, not revolving door check cashers), labor oversight (to handle the lack of worker power within the service industries), a combination of worker safety and environmental protection overseers to monitor the fiefdoms of resource extraction (which has largely supplanted the blue collar work that was available in manufacturers), and consumer advocates in contract relationships.
These are questions that should be given a serious study, not a study that uses a DHS fudge to make their point.
If you look at this paper's figure 1, you can see the TSA spike and the comment:
"The largest budget increases in 2012 have gone to agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and the Coast Guard; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO); the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The President requests additional increases for some of these agencies in 2013 (FDA, CBP, Coast Guard, PTO, SEC) but not others (notably TSA)."
Who does this kind of scholarship?
Turns out it's this person:
"Susan E. Dudley (born May 27, 1955) is an American academic who served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Office of Management and Budget in the administration of George W. Bush"
OH. You mean she oversaw the "regulatory growth" she complains about during the administration that COINED the Department of Homeland Security?
OF COURSE.
And of course "Dudley worked at the non-profit Mercatus Center at George Mason University".
Your partisan hack alarm bells should be sounding off loud right now.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 2 Jul 2012 at 10:34 PM
PS. If we're going to define the TSA as a regulatory agency overseeing the traffic and baggage of individuals, are we going to define the IRS as regulators of an individual's monetary traffic?
Because the trend with the IRS since the 1980's (considering the growth of the economy they oversee) would probably offset the DHS growth a bit.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 2 Jul 2012 at 10:41 PM
Fiddle diddle, forgot the Dudley link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Dudley
Bonus:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/dudleyreport.pdf
Perfect expert for the story you want to tell.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 2 Jul 2012 at 10:44 PM
Whats the difference between High Speed Universities and “Brick and Mortar?” Online pays for the education. It does not pay for athletic programs or programs that are not beneficial to all. There is no socio-economic or social cast systems.
#4 Posted by harrietbetancourt, CJR on Tue 3 Jul 2012 at 02:32 AM
The warfare-nanny state is never too big for the "humanitarians." The "compassionate conservatives" and "liberal progressives" are statists just the same.
#5 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 3 Jul 2012 at 12:42 PM
Great catch on Dudley, Thimbles. I should have known.
#6 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 3 Jul 2012 at 07:38 PM