On this day in 1981, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12291, which called for federal agencies to perform a benefit-cost analysis (otherwise known as cost-benefit analysis) for all regulations, and to issue the regulations only of the benefits outweighed the costs. Incredibly, there was no dispensation for factors that couldn't be easily quantified monetarily - that aspect was introduced in a later executive order by Clinton.
There's not a lot of material floating around on the large scale effects BCA has had on the way our government operates (here's an intro from Cato), but I think the operative notion here was that efficiency should trump fairness. So, questions about how wealth is distributed in a given regulatory scheme are of no consequence under BCA. Also, laws which can't be efficiently enforced are simply not enforced, which can be a serious problem when you have regulatory agencies facing off with massive moneyed interests.
The strong justification for decreased regulation is that these interests inevitably co-opt the agencies that regulate them through the money side of the political process. Under this view, an order that requires regulations to be efficient should reduce political influence across the board. However, it does not appear that 12291 has brought about such a result.
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