text: Efforts to control Leviathan have evolved slowly throughout our history. As the disciplining effects of controls in the tax and spending area have improved, there has been a natural tendency by regulators to select the least disciplined instrument of regulation. For that reason, regulations have become the preferred tool of special interests and those who believe the public interest is best advanced by expanding political interference in the economy. It is time to begin to subject regulations to the same type of controls to which expenditures have long been exposed. That does not mean that OIRA should presume to "know" what regulations are best, but, rather, that OIRA should ensure that the information provided on the costs of regulation (and benefits to the extent these continue to be requested) are reasonably honest and defensible. That goal is ambiguous enoughOIRA should reject all speculative arguments (the various gimmicks discussed in the latter part of the report) based on theoretical deviations from a "perfect market." OIRA should examine whether an agency has considered the possibility that existing regulations might have created the problems that the new regulation supposedly "solves" and instead call for reducing the scope and scale of government interference in the economy.