US Executive Agencies to conduct ex ante impact assessments

From Cary Coglianese: "Rigorous, ex post evaluation research can not only help regulators understand and improve the rules under evaluation; by extension, it can also help inform future regulatory decision making... Evidence-based governance requires making more of these kinds of connections between ex post evaluations and ex ante policy decisions... By thinking hard about evaluation even during the development of a new rule, agency officials will not only be better positioned to conduct high quality evaluation research at some point down the road – but the discipline such thinking imposes should also help officials improve the design of the rule at the outset. Nearly twenty-five years ago, social scientist Serge Taylor wrote Making Bureaucracies Think, a book about how the National Environmental Policy Act imposed analysis requirements on government agencies, prompting them to think more seriously about the environmental effects of their actions. The retrospective regulatory review process Obama has imposed this year on agencies might well make a fitting sequel: Making Bureaucracies Think – Part II."