Bounded Evaluation: Cognition, Incoherence, and Regulatory Policy
1. See ROBERT A. KAGAN, ADVERSARIAL LEGALISM: THE AMERICAN WAY OF LAW 198 (2001) ("Institutional fragmentation results in overlapping, imperfectly coordinated regulation by numerous local, state, and federal agencies, which may be dominated by different political parties with different regulatory policy preferences."); OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET, MORE BENEFITS, FEWER BURDENS: CREATING A REGULATORY SYSTEM THAT WORKS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE (1996), available at http://whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/3_year_report.html ("Given each agency's legitimate focus on its own mission, and the fact that the Federal government is a complex organization with programs dispersed among many different agencies, sub-agencies, and offices, it is not unusual to find regulations that are inconsistent, incompatible, or duplicative."); E. Donald Elliott & Gail Charley, Toward Bigger Bubbles, 13 FORUM APPLIED RES. & PUB. POL'Y 48 (1998) (arguing that the "fragmentation of policymaking into separate regulatory programs makes it virtually impossible for comparative risk priorities to be set on a rational basis that even approaches maximizing the social benefit from a given level of investment"); Alice M. Rivlin, Rationalism and Redemocratization: Time for a Truce, in WORST THINGS FIRST? 21, 26 (Adam M. Finkel & Dominic Golding eds., 1994) ("[L]eft to its own devices, the political system comes up with what almost anybody would think of as bizarre answers and misallocations of resources-with too much spent on relatively low-risk phenomena and, at the same time, a relative starving of problems where the risks might be very high."). 2. OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL REGISTER, THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT MANUAL, 2001/2002 app. C, at 653-61 (2001) (listing more than 300 federal agencies whose regulations appear in the Code of Federal Regulations). See also John D. Graham, Speech to Weidenbaum Center Forum, Presidential Management of the Regulatory State (Dec. 17, 2001), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/graham_speech 121701.html