Czar of the Day

So I'm already frusturated with the Czar of the day. When it comes into looking into each Czar, things get really hard to verify. With that said, I have no interest in misleading my readers, I only want to present facts. When looking into today's czar, I found it easy to verify the job of the czar, but any personal aspects of the czar, completely unreliable. With that said, I'm going to share with you what I found today, and leave it at that. I hope everyone understands that these unelected officials do have extrodinary power, and we as US citizens have a responsibility to understand that, and care who they are and what they can do.
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A new Czar was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday this week, so I thought I'd begin with the newest Czar.

Name: Cass Sunstein

Czar Job: Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)...(aka Regulatory Czar). Note: The OIRA has been around since 1980.

Job Description: Oversees the implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information technology, information policy, privacy, and statistacal policy (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/OIRA_QsandAs/).

"Under Executive Order, OIRA reviews hundreds of significant proposed and final rules from all federal agencies before they are published in the Federal Register. As a resulet of OIRA's review, many draft rules are changed before publication, withdrawn before a review is completed, or returned to the agencies because, in OIRA's opinion, certain aspects of the rule need to be reconsidered. Despite its importance, OIRA's regulatory review function generally is not well documented or well understood." (Directly from a Report issued by the Government Accounting Office found at: (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03929.pdf )

One part of the above report has a table it in, that lists some of rules that OIRA has had a direct impact on (meaning they added parts to the rule, deleted parts of the rule, or just simply editoral changes to the rule.) Here is a list of some of these rules the OIRA had an impact on.

- National Primary Drinking Water Regulation
- Aging Airplane Safety
- Identification and Listing of Hazardous Waste
- Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards
- Fees for FAA Services for Certain Flights
- Occupational Injury and Illness Recording and Reporting
- Export Requirments for Unapproved New Drug Products
- Food Additive Notification System

In summary: From what I have gathered, it appears that the OIRA takes proposed rules from other government agencies (EPA, FAA, FCC, FMEA etc) and edits them prior to final publication. Their editing can be anything from completely removing the rule, to minor editoral changes.

Info about the Administrator of OIRA (Regulatory Czar):
Education: Graduated in 1978 from Harvard Law School magna cum laude.
Past Jobs: He has been a professor of law at such universities such as Harvard. He has been an author of several books and works on various projects involving the relationship between law and human behavior.