Eyeing the 2012 Race, Obama’s Top Regulator Cozies Up to Business

Posted on Jun 13, 2011

Flickr / GregPC

Cass Sunstein

In a time of critical problems such as climate change and high unemployment, Barack Obama’s regulatory czar is busy trying to secure the president’s re-election by indulging the anti-regulatory appetites of gluttonous corporations, according to a report by Dan Froomkin. —ARK

Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post:

And as the White House increasingly focuses on raising vast amounts of money for the 2012 reelection campaign, critics are seeing a disturbing new trend: After two years of relative inaction, [Cass] Sunstein (and his boss) now appear to be actively using the regulatory process to ingratiate themselves with deep-pocketed corporate interests.

In the last five months, Obama and Sunstein have issued highly-publicized orders to government regulators to look not forward, but backward—requiring them to review existing regulations with an eye to making sure they aren’t too onerous for business.

In case this exercise’s target audience wasn’t clear already, Sunstein chose to go public in late May with the initial results of the effort in a speech at the ferociously anti-regulation American Enterprise Institute and in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

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