The Struggle to Reform Regulatory Procedures, 1978–1998

This article examines the attempts between 1978 and 1998 to enact general regulatory procedural reform legislation. Two decades of off-again, off-again legislative efforts have yielded only fragments of reform. A major explanation for this, despite the official popularity of reform, seems to be the inability of putative reformers-traditionalists, populists, and restrictivists-to agree among themselves on the direction and content of general reform legislation. This experience raises a number of important theoretical issues for students of regulation, including the ethicalness of using procedural restraints deliberately to disrupt or impede the regulatory process and the impact of procedural controls on regulatory policy.