text: Regulatory agencies face far weaker restraints. Indeed, once the organic legislation empowering the regulatory agency is enacted, it faces few further checks. Before promulgating any specific regulation, it will, of course, have to jump through various procedural hoops, but there will be no effective check on the costs it can impose on the U.S. economy. OIRA now requires many agencies to demonstrate that the costs and benefits of each regulation have been calculated. Most regulatory agencies soon find out, however, how to employ creative accounting to ensure high B/C ratios. And when they find even this weak criteria difficult, they note that they deal with areas where markets are either weak or non-existent (in many cases because the regulatory agencies have preempted the emergence of private risk management arrangements) and advance various non-use values to justify their programs. Regulators have to be very stupid to actually be disciplined.