Simpler: the future of government and regulatory reform

President Obama's Regulatory Czar

Cass Sunstein has served as President Obama's regulatory czar and discusses his service in this position in a book he wrote regarding the future of government. In his book, Sunstein provides considerable insights regarding how he assisted in simplifying bureaucracy resulting in increased cost-effectiveness and realization of improved outcomes. The cost-effectiveness is evident in that he helped save the country $91 billion and improved outcomes is associated with healthier and longer lives for Americans. Despite his remarkable achievements, Cass Sunstein left the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2012. While Sunstein's helped in the implementation of several policies, there are additional policies that can be implemented to help in further simplification of this leviathan of a government.

Sunstein's Work

One of the major issues that have characterized President Obama's administration in the past four years is regulations, which is one of the most controversial issues or topics in Washington, DC. Actually, conservatives and industry groups have accused the president for developing and enacting many regulations including rules for Wall Street, rules for automobiles, and rules for coal plants. In contrast, progressive groups argue that while President Obama is coming up with many regulations, the White House is relatively slow in developing many significant regulations that could enhance health and safety (Plumer, 2013).

One of the major things Cass Sunstein accomplished during his stint as President Obama's regulatory czar was ensuring improved openness and transparency in light of how agencies considered public comments. This process of improvement was characterized with substantial upgrading of regulations.gov through which people can see proposed regulations. Secondly, Sunstein embarked on an increasingly disciplined assessment of the costs and benefits of regulations in attempts to constantly quantify what needed to be quantified. In this case, his focus was to lessen the costs of rules while increasing their net benefits, particularly during economically difficult times.

Cass Sunstein's provides several examples of how he accomplished these objectives in his book, Simpler: The Future of Government. Notably, these objectives were based on the premise that the government has effectively promoted interagency coordination and consultation and careful assessment of costs and benefits, which has been a long-term aspect of regulation for several years. He also recognizes that the implementation of regulatory is significantly affected by complexity, which is a major problem in the way the government has been operating. The complexity was characterized by accumulating paperwork burdens without significant efforts toward large-scale reduction. Generally, Sunstein helped in ensuring that the net benefits of rules outweighed costs despite increased criticisms that the government was coming up with too many costly rules.

Further Simplification

As the current regulatory czar for the President, I would implement additional policies or measures to make this leviathan of a government even simpler by looking at something Sunstein did not do. The need for further simplification is fueled by the need for government itself to get simpler in order to be more effective and beneficial to people. The need for a much simpler government is also brought by the increasing complexity of the world including the public sector (Sunstein, 2013, p.209).

The main area I will focus on in order to achieve this objective is prioritizing and implementing measures that will contribute to significant measurable financial savings and reductions in paperwork burdens in a manner that is consistent with the 1995 Paperwork Reduction Act. This is a significant approach towards simplifying this leviathan government that is increasingly coming with too many rules and regulations. Even though Sunstein recognized the need for lessening paperwork, he did not implement adequate measures towards significant reduction of paperwork.

The process of paperwork reduction is part of simplifying choice architecture given the strong link between burdens of paperwork to governmental complexity. As previously mentioned, one of the major problems in the operations of President Obama's administration is increased complexity. This complexity is attributed to accumulating paperwork burdens given that the developed rules are either hundreds or thousands of pages that make it difficult for people to understand their contents. Actually, the criticisms that the Obama Administration is coming up with too many rules or regulations is partly attributed to the difficulties in understanding these rules because of more paperwork. In addition to expectations of increased paperwork burdens, there has been relatively no large-scale initiative towards reduction in order to lessen complexity and make the government much simpler.

Therefore, the establishment of adequate measures to lessen the accumulating paperwork associated with the development of more rules is a vital step toward dealing with the increased complexity and ensuring the Obama administration is much simpler across its operations. These efforts should be accompanied with constant initiatives toward re-evaluating regulatory requirements as well as streamlining, enhancing or eliminating those requirements. According to Sunstein (2012), governmental agencies should take meaningful measures towards decreased paperwork and reporting burdens on the citizens of the United States. This process would entail removing unnecessary or redundant collections, using short form options in drafting and reporting rules, and use of simplified applications. The reduction of paperwork in drafting the rules has considerable benefits in relation to simplifying the administration's operations including significant cost-savings and promoting easy understanding of proposed rules among the American people.

Execution of the Policy