The most promising first step toward ensuring democratic accountability in the administrative state is to adopt a proposal made by the only Supreme Court jus-tice in history to be nominated by a president of one party and confirmed during the administration of a president of the other—Stephen Breyer. In his 1993 book, Breaking the Vicious Circle, Justice Breyer summarized the U.S. approach to regulation as an irrational combination of too little regulation of some risks and too much regulation of others.1 He attributed those unfortunate characteristics to politicians’ reactions to famously inaccurate public perceptions of risks. He identified an expanded version of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) as a partial solution to the problem of irrational and inconsistent patterns of regulation.

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