From the Los Angeles Times:

6:40 PM PDT, April 4, 2007


WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Wednesday appointed as his top regulatory official a conservative academic who has written that markets do a better job of regulating than the government does and that it is more cost-effective for people who are sensitive to pollution to stay indoors on smoggy days than for the government to order polluters to clean up their emissions.

As director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Susan E. Dudley will have an opportunity to change or block regulations proposed by government agencies.

Bush also named a researcher at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank in Washington, as deputy director of the Social Security Administration. Andrew G. Biggs has been an outspoken proponent of converting Social Security benefits into self-directed retirement accounts, which Bush favors but Democrats have stopped cold. Bush nominated Biggs to that post in November, but the process stalled in February when the Senate Finance Committee refused to hold confirmation hearings because of his views of privatization.

And as ambassador to Belgium, Bush installed Sam Fox, a St. Louis businessman and GOP fundraiser who contributed $50,000 to the Swift Boat veterans' campaign against John F. Kerry in the 2004 presidential race. The White House actually withdrew Fox's nomination last week in the face of opposition from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

With the Senate on its spring break, all three received "recess appointments," under which they can serve without Senate confirmation until the 110th Congress adjourns in late 2008 or early 2009. Bush has used recess appointments more than 100 times, often to get around a recalcitrant Senate.

Although Dudley's new job is more obscure than those to which Biggs and Fox were appointed, it is also potentially the most powerful. The budget office's regulatory shop acts as a funnel for all regulations emanating throughout the government.

In congressional testimony, Dudley has favored dispensing with costly air pollution controls and initiating a pollution warning system "so that sensitive individuals can take appropriate 'exposure avoidance' behavior" -- mostly by remaining inside.

She opposed stricter limits on arsenic in drinking water, in part because she argued that the Environmental Protection Agency's calculations of the costs and benefits overvalued some lives, particularly those of older people with a small life expectancy.

She has argued that air bags should not be required by government regulation but requested by automobile consumers willing to pay for them.

Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy for the watchdog group OMB Watch, called Dudley a "terrible pick." He described her as "an anti-regulatory extremist" who believes that the proper regulatory lever is the free market, "and if the market doesn't protect you, too bad."

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, called her a "radical reactionary" who favors business over public protection.