Reader Comment – 07-29-12 – OMB Delay

An anonymous Reader left a comment on Sunday’s post about another reader comment about the withdrawal of the CFATS personnel surety ICR. This anonymous Reader (maybe the same one, who knows, he’s anonymous) asked two interesting questions:

“I wonder why OMB took over a year without action? Is that standard practice for OMB?”

Year Long Delays

Let’s look at the second question first. Looking at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (an agency of the OMB) web site we can see that since July 30^th 2009 there have been 13,931 information collection requests filed. Of those ICRs, 228 have been withdrawn by the submitting agency. Of those ICRs, 4 were withdrawn one year or more after their submission. The record was 20 months for an EPA ICR for their turbidity monitoring requirements submitted on January 29^th, 2010.

This is certainly not a common action by the OMB, but it is not unique. Most new ICR’s are processed by OIRA in just a couple of months. But every-once-in-awhile the Office drags their feet until the submitting agency drops the ICR.

Why the Foot Dragging

The first thing that we have to remember is that the OMB exists in the Office of the President. While it has a specific regulatory review authority and purpose it is also a political office. In that arena it is responsible for ensuring that the regulatory actions of the various Executive Branch agencies are kept within the political agenda of the President.

This particular CFATS ICR was a political nightmare. In its two formal iterations the personnel surety program drew negative comments from just about every commenter that submitted comments. Labor and management equally detested the program and a number of Congressmen have questioned. The comments of everyone were practically ignored by the crafters at ISCD who moved forward with the politically flawed program.

My guess is that someone at OMB finally convinced the folks at ISCD (and the new Director, David Wulf, really had nothing to do with formulating either the ICR or the underlying program) that the ICR had no hope for approval. With the November election still in doubt the Administration’s hope for putting its mark on the program might depend on an early approval of the ICR.

We will see how quickly the revised program is rolled out.

Reader Comment – 7-27-12 – CFATS Personnel Surety

I had not intended to discuss the opening comments made by the chair and ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in last week’s CFATS hearing since they didn’t have the political integrity to make a copy of their opening statements (either in writing or video) available for the public record. An anonymous reader, however, posted a question about a comment made by Rep. Price (D,NC), the ranking member, about an important issue, so I will relent.

Anonymous noted that:

“One of the interesting questions asked at the beginning from Mr. Price stated that he wanted to understand how so much money was spent on the Personal Surety program and then OMB can deny it. What step was missed in that process?”

Since I have no way of verifying the remark independently because of the lack of public record on the hearing (the hearing web page only provides links to the written statements from the two witnesses, which are independently available on the GAO and DHS web sites respectively) I can only accept the word of my anonymous reader that Mr. Price made such a politically naïve question. As reader’s of this blog are aware, I wrote back on July 21^st that NPPD had withdrawn the ICR, it was not disapproved by OMB.

Now to be fair to Price, who is an obvious political neophyte (Sarcasm Alert), I’m relatively sure that OMB was never going to approve this ICR because of vocal opposition from both business and labor; a political one-two punch that no Administration can afford to ignore. The fact that OMB had taken no action on the ICR in almost a year was certainly a good indication of the poor chance that it stood of being approved.

Now at the end of his opening statement (that part I did catch) the Ranking Member did make a comment about how disappointed that the ICR was withdrawn without notifying the Committee, especially with this hearing in the works. Deputy Under Secretary Spaulding noted in the off-the-cuff start to her testimony that the failure to do so was an oversight and the timing of the withdrawal was specifically selected so that it could be discussed in that hearing.

As I noted earlier, the meeting was cut way short by a lengthy series of floor votes. We will have to wait for it to be re-scheduled to hear that discussion. As of this morning there is no such hearing scheduled, according to the Committee web site.