Commentary on Jim Tozzi, “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Past, Present, and Future”

Abstract

Jim Tozzi is an activist institutional economist. During his 19-year career in the federal civil service, he was a pertinacious institution builder, armed with a PhD in economics but never flaunting it. He gained a reputation, richly deserved in my experience, as a supreme bureaucratic tactician. But he applied his skills to antibureaucratic purposes. Incessantly, and occasionally at professional risk, he promoted and protected internal executive-branch procedures that used economic analysis, and measures of administrative effectiveness, against the incessant forces of political entropy, agency parochialism, and special-interest capture.