The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

The idea that decisions should be based on careful evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of alternative policies has enormous appeal, as demonstrated by the extensive use of benefit-cost analysis around the world. However, as conventionally implemented, benefit-cost analysis is based on strong normative assumptions. To measure individual wellbeing, it relies on individuals’ willingness to exchange their own income for the outcomes they themselves experience. To measure societal welfare, it relies on simple aggregation of these values across individuals. Although many alternatives have been proposed, they are not as well-developed nor widely used, and their normative dimensions have not necessarily been thoroughly explored.

To address these concerns, the Brocher Foundation hosted a 2022 Summer Academy, “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise - The Ethics of Health Valuation,” selected by the Foundation’s Scientific Committee and organized by Lisa Robinson, Nir Eyal, Samia Hurst, and Daniel Wikler. As indicated in the program (which includes links to related readings), participants explored multiple dimensions of several alternatives to the conventional approach. Examples include measures of subjective well-being (“happiness”), equivalent income, and healthy life years, as well as social welfare functions. Variants include those that assign extra weight to benefiting the very young, or the poor, the unhealthy, or the otherwise disadvantaged.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

In December 2024, I stepped down—on my own terms—from a long and deeply rewarding career as an economist in the federal government. Since then, I’ve been observing the policy world from the outside, immersing myself in current debates, and reflecting on the evolving role of benefit-cost analysis (BCA). Old habits die hard, and I often find myself thinking about how I might approach today’s policy challenges—and what advice I’d offer to former colleagues and decision-makers navigating them.

One development that caught my attention was the January 2025 executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with its promise to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The formation of DOGE teams—each composed of an engineer, a human resources specialist, an attorney, and a team lead—signaled a renewed focus on operational performance. Having spent decades inside government, I’m intimately familiar with the inefficiencies that persist. As I began exploring ideas, I reconnected with a former colleague whose insights on efficiency I deeply respect. Together, we wrote a paper to look at a central claim of a proposed Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rule: that reclassifying federal positions to at-will status would yield large gains in agency efficiency. Our working paper, “From Rhetoric to Reform: Civil Service Employment Structures and the Measurement of Government Efficiency” is now available.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Benefit-cost analysis has been part of the U.S. regulatory development process for over 40 years. The historic record, when coupled with recent actions, raises questions about its continued role ‒ in particular whether the focus will shift increasingly to considering costs without comparison to benefits.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Benefit-cost analysis has been a part of the United States regulatory process for a long time.  It began in the 1970s with efforts by Presidents Ford and Carter to centralize presidential control of regulatory agencies as regulations to protect public health proliferated (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23065472).  In Executive Order 12291, President Reagan required that agencies conduct regulatory impact analyses (RIA) (which included attempts to measure benefits and costs) for a subset of regulations.  While the process was continually revised afterwards (most notably by President Clinton, issuing Executive Order 12866 in 1993), the process for agency issuance of regulations and the role of RIAs looked roughly the same in 2016 as it did in 1981.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

 Regulatory Budgets in Theory and Practice

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration.

With the volatility and uncertainty of the first few weeks of the Trump administration, it is hard not to feel overwhelmed. One way to cope with information overload is to focus on issues where one has particular knowledge and interest. For me, that’s the regulatory process and benefit-cost analysis. In that vein, this post reviews some of the most consequential regulatory directives, and concludes that, while there is room for disagreement on details, the general requirement to base regulations on an understanding of benefits and costs remains intact.

The views presented in On Balance are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Society, its Board, or its members. 

This post is part of a series on President Trump’s deregulatory record and what we might expect in the new administration. 

 President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his first Administration achieved an unparalleled reduction in federal regulations. He has boasted, for example, that 25,000 pages of “job-destroying regulations” had been removed—more than under any previous President, he has said. Yet an examination of the Code of Federal Regulations, the authoritative repository of binding federal rules, tells a different story.