Excerpts:

… ACUS was established as a permanent independent agency by the Administrative Conference Act of 1964,1 following two successful temporary administrative conferences in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Its mission is to be the federal government’s in-house expert and advisory agency on the administrative process. Its organization is designed to tap the expertise of government “members” from every significant agency in the executive branch and outside experts. Conference procedures are designed to produce consensus on the knotty procedural problems of the day.

…About 200 employees from all over the federal government were assembled, on loan from their home agencies, to work from March 3, 1993 to September 7, 1993 when the report was issued. They were organized into a series of agency-specific and governmental systems teams. Also, the President asked his cabinet to create internal “reinvention teams” to work in parallel and create “reinvention laboratories” to begin experimenting with new ways of doing business. Finally, the Vice President personally held “town meetings” at each cabinet department, heard from tens of thousands of citizens and led reinventing government conferences in Tennessee and Philadelphia.

One of the eleven “systems reinvention teams” was the “Improving Regulatory Systems” team. When I was recruited as leader in April, I noticed that its name was a bit more modest than some of the other teams that sported ambitious gerunds such as “transforming,” “reinventing,” “rethinking,” “redesigning” and “reengineering.” Whether intended or not, this turned out to be consistent with one of our basic conclusions: Relieving the burden of regulatory process on both the regulated and the regulators lies in improving the current system rather than in radically restructuring it.

In interviewing regulators and regulated parties, we invariably found that the first item on their agenda was “OMB review of rules.” Fortunately, our limitation precluded discussions of this politically charged issue and enabled us to develop consensus recommendations more easily…

Scheduling demands necessitated by our deadline made empirical research impossible. We therefore reviewed past studies (including, of course, those done by ACUS) and conducted a series of interviews with business groups, public interest lawyers, and agency and Congressional staffs about perceived regulatory problems to begin making (and auditioning) lists of problems and potential solutions.

In June we received a major boost with the release of a three-year study by a panel of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, headed by former EPA Administrator Douglas Costle.7 The panel was exceptionally distinguished and included, Judges Stephen Breyer and Patricia Wald, Professors Donald Elliott and Richard Merrill, and former duPont Chairman, Irving Shapiro, among others. Its report was quite thoughtful and consistent with our findings, and we drew heavily from it.