Clinton Order Lifts Regulatory Review Secrecy : Government: Executive edict requires that contacts between White House aides, lobbyists be made part of public record.

The Clinton Administration bade farewell to former Vice President Dan Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness Thursday, issuing a new executive order that bans secret contacts between White House officials and special interest lobbyists and requires public disclosure of White House regulatory reviews.

The new order on the government regulatory process is a quintessentially Clintonian product--a “balanced” approach, as White House officials repeatedly labeled it--that drew endorsements from such usually warring parties as the Sierra Club and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Business groups were pleased that Clinton decided to retain the White House-controlled process for reviewing agency regulatory proposals--a process that began in the Jimmy Carter Administration but was greatly expanded under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. On the other side, environmental, labor and other groups that lobby for regulation won tough, new public disclosure rules to end the widespread practice of “back door” lobbying of the White House by businesses seeking to water down proposed regulations.

During the Bush Administration, the Competitiveness Council, staffed by aides to Quayle, became the main focus of efforts to roll back government environmental and safety regulations that business advocates believed were too burdensome.

Quayle aides met frequently, generally in secret, with advocates for businesses targeted by proposed regulations and used the power of a little-known White House office--the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is part of the Office of Management and Budget--to hold up proposed rules until regulatory agencies agreed to make changes.

Under the new Clinton order, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs will retain its power to review proposed new rules. The White House needs a central review process to coordinate the different agendas of disparate regulatory agencies and to ensure that the President’s priorities prevail, officials argued.

But the White House officials will have to meet strict deadlines designed to prevent them from indefinitely delaying action. And any contact between White House officials and lobbyists for or against a regulation will have to be recorded and placed in the public record.

In addition, the new order contains a small, but potentially significant, change in how agencies conduct cost-benefit analyses of new rules. From now on, the order says, agencies must weigh “qualitative measures of costs and benefits” in addition to traditional numerical measures.

Environmental and safety advocates have long pushed for that change, arguing that traditional cost-benefit analysis tilts against regulation because costs to business can easily be quantified while gains to the public often are less tangible.

Under the new rules, agencies also must consider “distributive impacts” and “equity” when weighing courses of action--a new requirement designed to force agencies to consider whether, for example, a proposal to minimize a rule’s impact on business might create a disproportionate impact on a low-income neighborhood.

The new policy has been the result of long, sometimes tense, negotiations. Over the last several weeks, Administration officials made several significant changes in the order to accommodate strong objections from environmental and other groups that White House proposals had tilted too heavily toward business.