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 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 all regulations proposed by government agencies.
In a flurry of nominations and appointments, 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 on privatization.
And as ambassador to Belgium he installed Sam Fox, a St. Louis businessman and GOP fundraiser who contributed $50,000 to the Swift Boat veterans' controversial campaign against Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in the 2004 presidential race. The White House actually withdrew Fox's nomination to that same job last week in the face of strong 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, almost at the end of the Bush administration. Their nominations might have failed had they gone through the confirmation process.
Bush has used recess appointments more than 100 times, often to get around a recalcitrant Senate. In perhaps his most controversial such appointment, he named John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. Bolton served until late last year, when the 109th Congress adjourned and he was constitutionally required to step down.
Although Dudley's new job is more obscure than those to which Biggs and Fox were appointed, it also is potentially the most powerful. The budget office's regulatory shop acts as a funnel for all regulations emanating throughout the government.
