Author Archives: eehines

Changes to the Administrative Procedure Act?

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The incoming Trump administration and the newly installed Republican-led Congress (even if only more-or-less so in the Chaos Caucus-infested House) want to make deep changes to that Act. The law requires, among other things, advance public notice before regulations are adopted or rescinded. The Act more broadly

  • requires agencies to keep the public informed of their organization, procedures and rules
  • provides for public participation in the rulemaking process, for instance through public commenting
  • establishes uniform standards for the conduct of formal rulemaking and adjudication
  • defines the scope of judicial review

That public participation is the advance notice and public comment part, with the mandated notice being several months. The Act, though, was done in 1946, when information moved at the speed of newspapers and radio. We have computers today and the Internet with their vastly sped-up—not quite instantaneous—information dissemination capabilities. The advance notice requirement could easily and beneficially be shortened to 30 days for notice and public comment.

The transparency requirement could be sharply improved. One path for that is strictly enforcing responsiveness to FOIA requests by all agencies: require agency response within those same 30 days, with any failure to respond being deemed approved and the requested information required to be delivered in toto on the 31st day. Redactions also would be profitably limited much further, with reasons for allowed redactions being much more limited. Any document still containing redactions would be delivered promptly to the requester with the same document, wholly unredacted, delivered to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the relevant House and Senate committees for their information.

The judicial review requirement needs also to be tightened. This can be done by subjecting all rules that come before a court to substantial evidence review, which encompasses the agency’s assessment of the evidence in the record and its application of that evidence in reaching a decision. That standard requires courts to decide for themselves whether the agency’s factual and policy determinations were warranted in light of all the information before the agency at the time of decision. This is especially important in light of the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference: courts no longer are subordinate to agency technocrat “expertise,” no longer expected to take an agency’s bureaucrats’ blandishments seriously.

Why Some Can’t Have Nice Things

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A canonical example of this is Progressive-Democrat Party-run Chicago and Illinois:

City taxpayers spent $262 million from August 2022 through last month to care for migrants, records show, in addition to $368 million in state and federal grants.

Assuming a naïve estimate of 50% of those grants being from Springfield, that’s nearly half a billion dollars that could have gone—should have gone—toward dealing with Chicago’s homeless—more than 76,000 as of a month ago—supporting voucher and charter schools to improve the abusively undereducated children’s opportunities, (re)creating a market economy so the unemployed and underemployed could get jobs and off the city’s and State’s welfare rolls. That last, too, would release yet more funds for dealing with those homeless, children, and jobs.

All of that is a set of failure conditions that Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat managers are determined to maintain.

An effort to water down Chicago’s sanctuary ordinance failed Wednesday [15 January 2025], 39-11, in a city council vote. Mayor Brandon Johnson [D], a progressive critical of Trump, opposed a proposal that would have allowed police to work with federal agencies on deportation cases for those accused or convicted of gang activity, drug crimes, sex trafficking, or sex crimes with minors.

These wonders would rather have gangs, drugs, and sex criminals roaming the city’s neighborhoods than take care of their own.

This sort of progressive abusiveness is why so many American citizens can’t have nice things.

A Thought

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Ex-President Joe Biden (D) thinks he can enact an Amendment to our Constitution by tweeting it into existence: his announcement that the ERA Amendment is now the law of the land, he says.

With that precedent, President Donald Trump (R), who has some tweeting experience, can tweet out of existence other Amendments, or parts thereof: vis., part of the 14th Amendment.

All persons, born to parents at least one of whom is a citizen of the United States, or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

That ought to saucer and blow the matter.

Update: Oh, wait….

What’s the Downside?

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A Wall Street Journal article ruminating on Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio and his relationship with a number of diplomatic envoys who would report directly to President Donald Trump (R) had this concern:

[T]he system appears designed to expand Trump’s policymaking role while diminishing that of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security staff….

Of course. State, DoD, and those staffers all work for the President, they are not independent mini-government branches.

The President—every President—is the one in charge of foreign policy, both its development and its implementation. It’s imperative to our system of republican governance that those agencies, and all the other agencies in the Executive Branch, be brought back under control and reined in.

If They Were Serious

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Callum Borchers, a self-identified DEI maven, ended his Wall Street Journal article with this bit:

To restore confidence in hiring fairness, companies should make clear that business goals come first and diversity is part of a strategy to recruit top talent, she [Ruth Villalonga, who advises companies on diversity messaging as senior vice president at Burson] says.

If these wonders were serious about diversity improving their bottom lines, though, and not just engaged in cynically rephrasing their DEI sewage to better message it, they would take concrete steps in that direction.

Those concrete steps would begin with the Critical Item of no longer lying to their prospective hires and those passed over for promotion. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, as paraphrased by Borchers:

When a woman is promoted and a man was in the running, HR will often wink and say, “Maybe next time, guy.” Even when the woman is promoted because she’s better-qualified, it’s a way for the manager to get out of having a difficult conversation.

Here’s a carefully anonymous executive recruiter, whose level of integrity is illustrated by his cowering behind that anonymity:

[P]roviding honest feedback to unsuccessful job candidates is awkward and sometimes adversarial, so it is tempting to fudge the reason for rejection.
He offered a scenario: “How do you tell someone they had body odor or were weird? ‘Sorry, bud, DEI strikes again!'”

The answer to Anonymous One’s scenario is as straightforward as telling that person he has body odor, or is weird by the company’s standard. The truth may well be uncomfortable and awkward, but avoiding that in favor of lying both does a gross disservice to the one being rejected, denying him his opportunity understand where to improve, and it’s plain cowardly and dishonest. Who wants to work for a liar or a coward?

Those concrete steps would continue with another Critical Item: working from the ground up to help toddlers and pre-schoolers, and their parents, have actually equal opportunities at quality education so those children could develop their skills, their talents, their interests as they grow up and progress through K-12 and then trade school/community college or college and university.

Employers’ concrete steps would further include the Critical Item of pushing colleges and universities to eliminate DEI-related positions in school management and push STEM subjects in their school curricula, withholding recruiting efforts on their campuses and ignoring resumes with those schools’ degrees on them until they do.

Diversity—true, honestly built diversity—would flow out of that.