Daily Archives: 6 July 2022

A Simple Question

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And a simple answer.

In an article in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal about the West’s economic sanctions on Russia and their impact on Russian citizens, the authors, Ann Simmons and Yuliya Chernova, ask a simple question:

How effective are the sanctions against Russia proving to be?

The answer to that is blindingly obvious and is given by the answer to this question: How many battalions has Putin been forced by those sanctions to withdraw from Ukraine?

Meantime, in the face of namby-pamby sanctions and inadequate arms and ammunition shipments, Ukraine continues to lose ground, and Ukrainian civilian women, children, and old men continue to be butchered by the barbarian.

Regulatory Review and Streamline

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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) has a thought on this.

Youngkin signed Executive Order 19 to create the Office of Regulatory Management. This office will streamline the regulatory review process by subjecting agencies to its oversight. The executive order directs the new office to implement a 25% reduction in regulatory requirements.

And

The order states the office will review all regulations for their impact on local governments, the regulated community and private citizens. It will also streamline the regulatory process by requiring agencies to prepare a unified regulatory plan for every fiscal year.

It could work. It could, though, just turn into another layer of bureaucracy in getting regulations handled and new proposals enacted or rejected. As some of you might expect, I have a couple of thoughts of my own on this.

Although regulations must be reviewed every four years, the executive order states this is not uniformly achieved….

Regulations not reviewed on time or whose review isn’t finished on time should be deemed expired on the date of their review anniversary and no longer in existence as of that date. This requirement will require legislative action, though, rather than a Governor’s Executive Order.

And this thought, also deadline oriented:

According to the order, most regulatory proposals take two to three years to be adopted. The office will work to streamline this process to more quickly approve or reject proposed regulations.

Set hard deadlines—vis., 30 days, 90 days, as appropriate to the stage of proposal, 6 months to enactment—and if a stage of review is not complete by its deadline or the overall proposal not ready for enactment by its deadline, the proposal is deemed rejected and cannot be brought up again until after the next election cycle. This, too, will require legislative action rather than an EO.

Don’t allow stalling or dithering or indecision, or excuses for any of that. Push the pace, and specify the concrete, measurable response to stalling or dithering or indecision.