This spring the Biden administration proposed or enacted eight major environmental regulations, including the nation’s toughest climate rule, in a single season experts say the most ambitious limits the government has placed on polluting industries.
Piloting it all is a man most Americans have never heard of, and still runs a little-known agency.
But Richard Revesz has begun to change the basic math that underlies federal regulations designed to protect human health and the environment. And those calculations could affect American lives and the economy for years to come.
Mr. Reves, 65, heads the obscure but powerful White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is effectively the gatekeeper and final word on all new federal regulations. It’s known as a place where new regulations proposed by government agencies, particularly environmental standards, die — or at least weaken or delay.
But climate legal expert and former dean of New York University School of Law Mr. Reves joined the Biden administration in January to flip the script. Every time a major regulatory proposal lands on his desk, Mr. Revesz has used his powers to strengthen its legal analysis and make it more rigorous.
What’s more, he proposed a new method of calculating potential regulatory costs that would enhance the legal and economic justifications for those regulations to protect against the expected onslaught of court battles.
With his halo of snowy curls and Spanish lilt — a vestige of his childhood in Argentina — Mr. Revesz is known as “Ricky” by everyone from his law students to his legal opponents. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called him a “legend.” John Podesta, Mr. Biden’s senior climate adviser, who served in senior roles in the Obama and Clinton administrations, considers Mr. Revesz a hero.
Conservatives see Mr Revez differently.
“He’s a professor of gobbledygook!” Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill said she plans to join Republican attorneys general from other states in challenging Mr. Biden’s climate rules. “They’re making up these numbers to justify destroying the fossil fuel industry and the petrochemical industry, bankrupting people and destroying their lives. And they say they justify it all because of the future, because they say they’re saving the planet.
Climate regulations proposed by the Biden administration, along with $370 billion in clean energy funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, have carved the United States into the forefront of the fight to limit global warming.
As federal agencies write regulations, the role of the White House regulatory chief is to make sure they are legally and economically sound.
But the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (known as OIRA, which rhymes with Elvira) has often concluded that proposed environmental, health and safety regulations are too costly for business.
“In the past, OIRA has been a brake on regulations,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They have slowed things down and especially relaxed environmental regulations.”
That pattern held true regardless of the party in charge. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard economist who headed the regulator’s office during the Obama administration, reviewed the EPA’s proposal to reduce asthma-related pollution and determined that the costs to industry were too high despite the projected health benefits. The rule was suspended, infuriating environmentalists.
But in April, Mr. Revez proposed changing the way federal agencies calculate the costs and benefits of proposed regulations related to everything from climate change to consumer protections to make them more likely to see the light of day.
To date, such analyzes have mainly been based on the current cost of regulation to industry compared against the benefits to society. Mr. Revez’s change underscores how a regulation can benefit future generations.
That has particular meaning when it comes to climate regulation, as scientists say the impact of greenhouse gases emitted now could be felt in the future, in the form of rising seas, more destructive storms, extreme drought, wildfires and displacement.
“It’s basically saying that the federal government is not going to weigh the costs on the economy this year or next year while ignoring the benefits to our children, our grandchildren, their grandchildren,” said energy professor Robert Stavins. and economic development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
The change affects the metric the federal government uses to calculate the damage caused by one ton of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. Under the Obama administration, White House economists calculated that number to be around $50 a ton. Under the Trump administration, they dropped it to less than $5 a ton. Mr. Applying Reves’s formula costs about $200 a ton.
Plug that number into the EPA’s proposal to tighten tailpipe emissions — designed to boost sales of electric vehicles while ending the use of gasoline-powered cars — and the economic benefit could rise to more than $1 trillion. Estimated cost to the industry.
“It’s a very powerful change,” Mr. Revesz said.
He believes that the government should consider the impact of the proposed regulation on different segments of the population. Current methods weigh the impact of a proposed regulation on the population as a whole. But poor and minority communities face greater exposure to pollution, so they benefit more from those pollution limits.
Mr. Mr. Stavins and some other economists analyzed the impact of climate regulations. Revege says the method taken is the most accurate way. “That’s the right way to think about it and the right way to do it,” Mr. Stavins said.
Critics say the changes would lead to more government intervention in American life and hurt businesses by raising costs in an economy headed for recession.
“If they make decisions based on this change, it will have huge implications for all kinds of federal programs,” said Jeffrey Homestead, an attorney with Bracewell LLP who represents fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. “It certainly warrants more aggressive regulation, especially of greenhouse gas emissions, and it almost certainly increases the cost of energy flowing through the cost of goods and services.”
Susan Dudley, who headed the Comptroller’s Office in the George W. Bush administration and now directs the Center for Regulatory Studies at George Washington University, said Mr. Reves was trying to achieve a progressive agenda.
“There’s a danger to me there — the previous guidelines of Reagan, Clinton and Bush were neutral, objective and focused on efficiency,” he said. “I don’t think it will last under a Republican administration.”
Mr. Reves says he is simply modernizing the calculation method, which was last updated during the George W. Bush administration. In 2003, government economists estimated the impact of regulation on future generations by considering the average interest rate on government bonds over the previous 30 years. Mr. Revez took the same steps to come up with his metric.
“If you did the exact same arithmetic with the same formula over the last 30 years,” the result would place a higher dollar value in future lives, Mr.
A future administration may change the calculations again. But if that happens, “it will be clear that they have acted politically and they have acted against science and economics,” he said.
Calculating costs and benefits Mr. Revesz’s proposed approach will be finalized by the fall and used to justify Mr. Biden’s climate rules when they are enacted early next year.
Mr. Revesz first started thinking about costs and benefits as a child growing up in Buenos Aires. His parents had fled Hungary and Romania to Argentina during World War II; His grandparents and four of his six aunts were killed in Auschwitz.
Argentina offered little respite from danger; In the 1960s, a military dictatorship destabilized the country.
“I had to get up for school at 6:30, but we didn’t get any heat in our building until 8, and it was really cold in the winter,” he recalled in an interview. “So when my alarm goes off, instead of getting up immediately, I turn on the radio, because if there is a coup or an attempted coup or a general strike, there will be no school. And the probability of this happening is high enough that it makes sense to find out before I actually get out of bed for a cold.
He came to the United States in 1975 at age 17, two weeks before starting at Princeton on a full scholarship. After graduation, Mr. Revez earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became an American citizen during his second year at Yale Law School, where he was editor of the Yale Law Review. A clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall followed, and in 1985 he began teaching at New York University School of Law, where he served as dean from 2002 to 2013. From 2014 to 2022, he directed the American Law Institute, a century-old institution led by judges, law professors and legal experts.
He co-founded the NYU-affiliated think tank, the Institute for Policy Integrity, which Mr. Reves devised a method for analyzing the costs and benefits of environmental regulations that brought the White House.
During the Trump administration, he put that theory into practice: As the White House rolled back regulation after regulation, the nation’s Democratic attorneys general sued to fight the rollback. Mr. Revez helped craft several of his winning arguments.
“He was a great resource for us,” said former Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh.
After President Biden was elected, Mr. Revez joined his transition team and immediately impressed the incoming White House political staff.
“There are a million educators around transitions,” said Colin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, who worked on the Biden transition team. “But Ricky stood up immediately. He was incredibly specific about how to make the agency work better, how to make things stand up in court. There were a lot of conversations about how to avoid the fate of the Obama rules, and he was incredibly articulate.
Mr. Revez was on Mr. Biden’s short list to head the EPA — but the president’s advisers wanted to bring him directly to the White House.
When he was nominated, Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at Case Western University, wrote on Twitter: “He was the obvious choice for this position, one wonders it took so long.”
In an interview, Mr. Adler said, “If you want to go to court and file lawsuits against the rules of the Biden administration, you don’t want to mount the defense of Ricky Revez.”
Jim Tankersley Contribution report.