RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump on Friday reinforced how serious he is about reforming the regulatory state by nominating Neomi Rao to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The OIRA administrator, or “regulatory czar,” is the ultimate policy wonk. Ms. Rao, a respected legal scholar with experience in all three branches of government, is ideally suited to the job.

OIRA, which operates within the president’s Office of Management and Budget, may be the most important office you’ve never heard of. Its staff of fewer than 50 career professionals reviews the regulatory, information-collection and statistical activities of federal agencies. That may not sound exciting, but regulation is one of the most direct and powerful ways by which a president can advance his policies.

President Obama used regulation to get around Congress in pursuit of initiatives on climate change, immigration, worker pay and more. President Trump has promised to reverse those regulations and directed agencies to eliminate two old rules for every new one they issue.

OIRA allows the president to manage the regulatory authority that Congress has delegated to the executive branch. By some estimates regulations cost Americans more than $2 trillion a year, and every president since Reagan has recognized that letting agencies make policy without White House oversight would be like giving them a blank check on their budgets.

The next OIRA administrator will enforce Mr. Trump’s executive order that agencies eliminate costly regulations while identifying those that still provide significant net benefits. That will require principled and pragmatic leadership, and Ms. Rao has the experience, intellect and character for the job. She is an associate professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where she founded and directs the Center for the Study of the Administrative State. She directs a committee on regulatory policy for the American Bar Association. In addition to a sharp legal mind, Ms. Rao brings an openness to different perspectives and an ability to manage the competing demands of regulatory policy.

I served as OIRA administrator for the last two years of the George W. Bush administration and, like many others who held the position, consider it one of the best jobs in government. If confirmed, Ms. Rao will be involved in a dizzying range of issues and work with senior appointees across the government to implement important policies that affect people’s daily lives. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans left Washington on Friday without a health-care deal, despite renewed negotiations after last month’s fiasco and a burst of White House diplomacy. Perhaps the two-week recess will be a cooling-off period and we hope the House’s factions can agree on a deal. If they can’t, then at least we’ll learn who’s responsible for defeat.

After the Freedom Caucus killed the original health bill in March, the talks resumed, not least for practical and political imperatives. President Trump and Republicans campaigned on repeal and replace, and the President at least wants to keep his word. The ObamaCare exchanges are also fragile and precarious, and consumers harmed by rising premiums and declining choices are likely to blame the party in power.

But the divide between conservatives and centrists hasn’t narrowed. Last week, in part to create the appearance of progress, the House added an amendment on “invisible risk sharing” that would help bring down premiums by absorbing high-cost patients. The compromise was worked out by the Freedom Caucus’s David Schweikert of Arizona and Tom MacArthur of New Jersey, who is more moderate.
These talks are constructive, though the larger question is whether most of the Freedom Caucus members want a bill they can back or are merely trying to shift the blame for failure. They say they’ll support a bill that repeals, or creates a state waiver to avoid, the ObamaCare mandates that prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging more to patients based on pre-existing conditions. The Freedom Caucus is right that these mandates drive up the cost of insurance, but the moderates understandably don’t want to have a debate about how much to soak the sickest patients.

One reason is that this fight is largely pointless. True, the House bill doesn’t repeal the “community rating” that limits how much premiums can vary among consumers, but it does relax it enough to be effective repeal. Under ObamaCare, the costliest plan can be no more than three times as expensive as the cheapest, known as a 3 to 1 rating band. The House bill moves to a 5 to 1 band, which is above the true cost of care.

The latest disclosures that former Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice may have requested that intelligence agencies reveal or “unmask” those from the Trump team who were surveilled in purportedly normal intelligence gathering — and that such requests may have extended over an apparently considerable period of time — remind us that at some point there is always an accounting.

Rice’s past serial and shameless untruths about the tragic deaths at Benghazi (a 2012 Obama re-election “al-Qaeda on the run” narrative, with a supposedly spontaneous riot over a YouTube video as the cause of the attack) were contextualized by the media and eventually vaporized.

Her sad “honor and distinction” narrative about the Bowe Bergdahl betrayal of his comrades — the infamous purported “prisoner of war” “captured on the battlefield” fabrication — was intended to mask what was otherwise a dishonest and terrible hostage swap for someone who had endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers.

Recently, she has denied all knowledge of what House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes had been fighting to uncover, and has even tweeted periodically to criticize the purported ethical lapses and unprofessionalism of the Trump administration.

All that is a lot for even the gods to grind. If, as likely, she had access to, or requested, such raw data, and sent it, with names illegally unmasked, to primary players of the Obama administration (e.g., Clapper, Brennan, Rhodes, etc.), that fact would blow up some heretofore denials of any knowledge of such skullduggery and perhaps become the greatest presidential scandal of the last half century.

The Rice revelation might also put into the proper landscape the following:

a) the astounding self-confessionals of Hillary adviser Evelyn Farkas about her frantic efforts to convince Obama operatives to increase intelligence gathering and to leak the information to the press (what gave a former mid-level Department of Defense employee the presumption that she could influence the intelligence operations of the U.S. government?)

, b) the unprecedented eleventh-hour Obama effort to broaden access to classified data to spread and leak such unmasked individuals

, c) the political and media landmines that Representative Nunes (facing “kill the messenger” efforts to kill the message) had to navigate around and the character assassination to which he has been subjected