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**JANUARY 29, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Red Alert: The Return of Cass Sunstein

****

When I wrote a piece last spring called "The Biden Do Not Reappoint List
,"
it did not even occur to me to include Cass Sunstein on the roster of
Clinton and Obama horribles such as Larry Summers and Mike Froman. The
return of Sunstein seemed inconceivable.

For those who missed it, Sunstein under Obama headed a White House
office called OIRA, which stands for the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs. It was created late in the Carter administration and
then used under Reagan as a choke point to kill health, safety,
environmental, and labor regulations. If a regulation somehow made it
out of an agency, OIRA provided one more chance for industry lobbyists
to weaken it or kill it altogether.

But of all the heads of OIRA, Sunstein was the one who perfected the art
of strangling regulations, using cost-benefit gambits and other devices.
He actually bragged that under Obama, thanks to his efforts, there were
fewer regulations issued than under Reagan or either Bush. He was
especially the nemesis of EPA.

I wrote a long investigation of Sunstein's career in government and
academia in this piece
for

**Harper's**. He is basically a University of Chicago theorist who
tries, and fails, to reconcile free-market ideology with tepid
liberalism. Thus he argues that we need only gentle "nudges" to fix
markets at a time when capitalism run riot has produced everything from
gross inequality to climate catastrophe to financial collapse. But I
digress.

Biden is seeking to reverse the regulatory carnage of the Trump era, and
there is an effort well under way to turn OIRA into its opposite. As
proposed in a

**Prospect** article

last April, OIRA would become a White House office to promote and
coordinate good regulation, not kill it.

The deputy director of OIRA has already been appointed
,
and she happens to be Sharon Block, the very author of that

**Prospect** piece, and a strong proponent of that strategy.

A director of kindred views is expected to be named soon. Biden has
already issued an executive order to reverse what OIRA does.

So with Biden's policies and Sunstein's record, why on earth is
Sunstein telling colleagues that he is in line for a White House job?
The answer, for those familiar with the academic term, is that Sunstein
is what's called a "trailing spouse."

Sunstein's wife, Samantha Power, has been named by Biden to head
USAID. So Cass, who teaches law at Harvard, needs an appropriately
distinguished Washington job. But please, keep this man far away from
the seat of power. Give him a fellowship, say, at Brookings, where he
can do only modest damage.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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