Regulatory Humility Often Missing, Retired Lawyer Blake Says on AEI Blog
The time has come for a national review of how administrative agencies work and how the process too often breaks down, wrote Jon Blake, a retired communications lawyer from Covington Burling, Tuesday on an American Enterprise Institute blog. “With 70…
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years of experience in administrative law under its belt, our country should now be able to revivify and, where appropriate, reform the understanding of the mutual roles played by the four components of the administrative process,” Blake wrote. “So, convening at this time a special commission, like the old Attorney General’s Committee, to make recommendations for improving the performance of all four components in the administrative process could at the very least reconnect them to a common vision of how the process should work.” Members should include former and current agency heads, and representatives of the White House and Congress, he suggested. Regulatory humility is key to all components of the system -- the agencies themselves, Congress, the courts and the executive branch -- but is too often missing, Blake said. “A lack of humility in all four components is difficult to police,” he wrote. “Agencies can overreach in their intrusions into the marketplace, Congress can overreach in its oversight, legislators vis-à-vis agencies, and courts can overreach in second-guessing agency decisions, often based on technological innovation and consumer trends with which they are all too unfamiliar.”