its BOB predecessor agency moved from the Treasury Department to the newly created EOP in 1939. In chapter 6, Andrew Rudalevige examines the evolution of central clearance for legislation and executive orders, finding that it provides a systematic review process to enact the president’s policy program. While some appointees may, and will, try to bypass the review process and approach the president directly with policy proposals, Rudalevige shows how central clearance ensures numerous useful checkpoints that are difficult to ignore. As he writes, central clearance “is an early warning system.… This informational service helps agencies find out what their peers are up to—and to protect themselves against any self-aggrandizement those peers might attempt. This in turn helps OMB protect the president.”
The creation of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in 1980 (replacing an office with comparable responsibilities) extended the agency’s central clearance responsibilities to include regulatory review. Rachel Potter, in chapter 7, examines how OIRA has fared since then in reviewing agency rules (and, more recently, guidance documents), evaluating both successes and failures. Among the office’s successes are keeping and expanding regulatory review functions, establishing core principles for such review, and managing transparency in its review process with the need to achieve policy goals. Given numerous conflicts about OIRA’s jurisdiction over the years, Potter notes that “OIRA’s foremost success lies in its very survival.” But Potter also identifies weaknesses in OIRA’s work, including failures to routinize Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs), systematically oversee guidance documents from executive agencies, standardize regulatory lookbacks, and increase staff capacity. Addressing these issues is necessary, Potter concludes, for OIRA to have “a more streamlined and effective regulatory review process, one that instills confidence among both agencies and the public.”
OMB—MANAGING THE BUREAUCRACY (AND ITSELF)
As OMB’s budgetary and central clearance responsibilities have expanded, so, too, have its management duties for overseeing activities of federal agencies. A comprehensive understanding of OMB’s management role requires perspectives from federal executives inside the agency as well as in other agencies that work with OMB. In chapter 8, David E. Lewis, Mark D. Richardson, and Eric Rosenthal examine data from two surveys of federal executives, conducted in 2007 and 2014, to evaluate how OMB works with federal agencies. They find variations in OMB’s influence over policymaking, depending on the type of agency. For political actors, OMB exercises strong influence over agency policy decisions, and it is highly important in interagency processes. But independent agencies and agencies that have differing policy views from the White House, or that have reputations for skilled workforces, tend to view OMB as less influential. Consequently, the authors conclude that “presidents would be well advised to take great care to select qualified appointees to run OMB and be attentive to its health and effectiveness.” Furthermore, “for independent, highly skilled, and more ideological agencies,” presidents should identify “carefully selected appointees to head those agencies rather than relying on centralized control.”
A major challenge for OMB senior staff is meeting increasing responsibilities with limited resources. Geovette E. Washington and Thomas E. Hitter examine in chapter 9 how OMB’s power and influence have grown even as its size has remained largely constant over the last few decades, and they evaluate the agency’s current resources and needs. They find that even though both the White House and Congress have increased their expectations for OMB to work with agencies on internal management, the staffing for both the agency’s “B side” (budget) and “M side” (management) “largely reflect[s] what was in place when the agency was originally organized under President Nixon’s administration.” As other chapters in the volume discuss, OMB oversees the preparation and publication of executive orders and proclamations, coordination and clearance of agency recommendations on legislation, and coordination and review of federal regulations. The authors recommend creation of a senior career-level position in OMB as well as strategic planning of the agency’s “role and responsibilities,” stating that these changes “will allow the agency to continue to deliver for each of its stakeholders in a way that also supports the health of the organization and those that serve within it.”
OMB senior staff present additional important insights about the agency’s responsibilities in the policymaking process. In chapter 10, Matthew J. Dickinson builds upon interviews conducted with more than two dozen current and former OMB employees to evaluate how the agency has changed since BOB’s reorganization as the OMB in the Nixon administration. In particular, Dickinson examines whether political scientist Hugh Heclo’s widely cited concern from the mid-1970s that OMB was experiencing a decline in what he termed “neutral competence” applies today. Dickinson finds that OMB employees are highly committed to providing the White House with professional expertise, regardless of the president’s political party. At the same time, the White House expects OMB to assist with development and execution of the president’s policy agenda, and that responsibility has implications for the agency’s actions as well as for perceptions thereof. As Dickinson writes, after the Nixon administration’s reorganization of the OMB, “presidential expectations became greater, time horizons for accomplishing them shorter, the political constraints more daunting, resources increasingly scarce and—not least—the budgetary, regulatory, and management tasks even more complex.” Meeting these responsibilities while maintaining “neutral competence” is no easy task.
CONCLUSION
As OMB moves forward in the twenty-first century, certain agency reforms may promote more effective policymaking within the organization as well as in the federal government more broadly. In 2016, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service organization prepared a report that examined OMB’s areas of responsibilities and recommended measures to improve the agency’s effectiveness in achieving results that meet public needs.5 For this edited volume, in chapter 11, the Partnership presents a special update of recommendations from its 2016 report. Consistent with several of the analyses presented in the volume, the Partnership discusses how changes in OMB’s “organizational structure and processes” would improve the agency’s ability “to ensure its directives have been adopted and that the priorities and goals outlined in the president’s budget have been met.” The conclusion also anticipates questions about transitions in a presidential election year, whether from one administration to another or from a first to second term, and explains how OMB can be employed to advance a president’s agenda from the outset, working with the Cabinet and other agencies to plan strategically on how to enact top priorities.
As the conceptually coherent and empirically grounded analyses in the forthcoming chapters demonstrate, OMB is well positioned to serve as the engine of the president’s policy agenda for many years to come. With additional external resources of funding and staff and internal efforts to strengthen budgetary, regulatory, and management processes, the agency may improve its ability to achieve an administration’s priorities as well as its own long-term agency goals. The chapters in this volume demonstrate why those changes are needed in the twenty-first century and how they may be achieved.
Notes
1. Secretary Lew’s commentary from April 11, 2019, is reprinted as the Introduction in this volume.
2. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Introduction to the Federal Budget Process,” www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-introduction-to-the-federal-budget-process.
3. The White House Transition Project, 1997–2017, Report 2017–22, The Office of Management and Budget: An Insider’s Guide, www.whitehousetransitionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/WHTP2017_22_OMB_an_Insiders_Guide.pdf.
4. Jeffrey A. Weinberg, “The View from the Oval Office: Understanding the Legislative Presidency,” Journal of Legislative Studies 24, no. 4 (2018), pp. 395–412.