Lawyers and policy makers must work together, often for many months, to ensure that health and safety requirements will survive in court. And under both Republican and Democratic presidents, agencies must analyze the costs and benefits of expensive rules. That’s a great idea, but it can take a long time to do that analysis -- and to figure out what approach has the highest net benefits.

These are not the only reasons rules take so long. Under the law, members of the public file numerous comments on rules. Agencies have to respond to them. That’s also a great idea, but it strains agency resources and can much lengthen the process.

Even if regulatory capture usually isn’t the central problem, Warren’s proposals deserve serious consideration. She's right to say that Congress should give agencies the funding they need to do their jobs. She’s right to emphasize the importance of simplification. And more transparency is probably a good thing: If people have been paid to make comments on a regulation, it makes sense to require them to disclose that fact.

Conservatives have convincingly argued that the U.S. should trim the stock of existing rules, and that cost-benefit analysis can be an excellent safeguard against unjustified requirements. Progressives cannot reasonably deny those points.

At the same time, progressives can easily show that delaying life-saving regulations is a serious problem, and that agencies should not be relying on self-serving studies by people who have been paid to skew the regulatory process in their favor. Conservatives cannot reasonably disagree.

There are the ingredients here of genuinely bipartisan regulatory reform. Warren’s speech could be a significant step toward making that reform happen.

1 These are rules designated as significant by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. They’re the most important rules issued by any administration -- but there are thousands of others.

2 True, the number of $100 million rules was 637, but that’s plenty.

Cass R. Sunstein, the former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is the Robert Walmsley university professor at Harvard Law School.

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