Accelerating Progress and Institutionalizing Retrospective Review

By Howard Shelanski, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

In 2011, President Obama called on federal agencies to undertake an unprecedented governmentwide regulatory review to identify rules on the books with outdated requirements or unjustified 

costs. Retrospective review continues to be a key priority for the Obama Administration. Since 

the release of Executive Order 13563 in 2011, federal agencies have been continually identifying 

outdated and duplicative regulations and have taken action to modify or eliminate them where 

possible. And the Administration has made significant progress. For example, the Department of 

Transportation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Environmental 

Protection Agency, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have already finalized 

significant retrospective review initiatives. To date, the retrospective review process is expected 

to achieve $20 billion in savings over five years, and is on track to eliminate over 100 million 

paperwork burden reduction hours. 

Today, agencies released their bi-annual retrospective review plans, identifying recently 

completed initiatives as well as outlining what they are working to accomplish on retrospective 

review over the next year. As their plans outline, agencies across the government have 

continued to find ways to improve and streamline regulations on the books. Here are a few of 

the successes and ongoing initiatives worth noting: 

• The Social Security Administration (SSA) is developing an online application to allow 

certain members of the public to apply for replacement social security cards 

electronically without having to visit an office or mail in an application. In the proposed 

rule, an adult U.S. citizen meeting certain qualifications would have the option to file for 

an SSN replacement card online. 

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development published a proposed rule regarding 

housing voucher portability in March of 2012. The agency plans to finalize this 

streamlining regulation this year. The goal of this rulemaking is to make the voucher 

program more flexible and maximize family choice in locating housing. Reducing the 

administrative burdens involved with processing portability requests will enable Public 

Housing Agencies to better serve families and expand housing opportunities.

• In December 2014, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized a fraud 

protection final rule that helps prevent fraudulent entities from enrolling in Medicare by 

increasing the criteria for denying enrollment including: a felony conviction, relationship 

with a previously enrolled provider or supplier that had Medicare debt, pattern of 

submitting claims that don't meet Medicare standards, and limiting the ability of 

ambulance suppliers to bill for services performed prior to enrollment. CMS anticipates 

this that this could lead to reduced payments of about $327 million dollars to such 

potentially fraudulent actors.
Agency retrospective review efforts complement and advance many initiatives designed to 

improve the interaction of the American people with their government. For example, through 

Executive Order 13604, the Administration has worked to integrate ongoing agency efforts to 

identify specific changes to existing regulations that would help streamline, modernize and 

improve the efficiency of the federal permitting process for infrastructure projects. Pursuant to 

Executive Order 13659, DHS in coordination with the Department of Treasury is leading a 

whole-of-government effort to streamline the import/export process by developing a national 

“single window” through which businesses will submit the data required for international trade 

transactions. This effort will result in substantial burden reduction by significantly decreasing 

paperwork obligations and reducing redundant information collections.

In conjunction with producing their bi-annual retrospective review plans, federal agencies have 

also recently submitted to OMB written plans for stakeholder engagement. The goal of these 

plans is to get input on promising themes and specific targets for review and reform from parties 

with a stake in regulation. For example, the Department of Labor (DOL) launched an interactive 

“IdeaScale” website to seek public input on developing its preliminary retrospective review plan. 

This initiative allows individuals to submit their own recommendations for retrospective review

and to vote on others. DOL plans to expand on this robust, technology-driven engagement effort 

to identify opportunities for regulatory reforms. This initiative will feed into the Department’s 

July 2015 retrospective review report. 

We are proud of the progress made to date on retrospective review, but we know we can do 

more. To that end, we have begun to step up our collective efforts in the remaining months of the 

Administration to significantly accelerate progress and to better institutionalize retrospective 

review. We are focusing our efforts in four key areas:

• Reducing regulatory and compliance burdens for state and local government;

• Reducing regulatory burden for industry, with a focus on flexibility for small and new 

businesses;

• Regulatory modernization; and 

• Identifying areas with regulatory gaps or where regulations need to be strengthened.

As the President said in 2011, “We should have no more regulation than the health, safety, and 

security of the American people require. Every rule should meet that commonsense test.” OIRA, 

together with our agency colleagues, is determined to build upon the progress we have made 

since the President spoke those words. We will continue to expand the use of retrospective 

review, carefully consider ideas and input from the public as we make regulatory changes, and 

work to further institutionalize retrospective review in order to make government work more 

efficiently and effectively for the American people. We look forward to showing even more 

progress going forward.