WARREN G WOULD BE PROUD. It's easy to forget that while the Bush administration loudly ruins Iraq and the country, they spend a lot of time quietly ruining the government itself. Their latest attempt was part of their ongoing effort to stealthily degrade the federal regulatory process. In this case, they proposed a new, unified set of risk-assessment procedures that would affect all agencies. Critics said the rules were a blatant attempt to weaken government regulatory protections. The National Academy of Sciences convened a panel which, basically, agreed, taking the unusual step of calling the regulations so scientifically flawed that they �could not be rescued.� The Bush administration, presumably unwilling to be dragged before the new Congress over this, backed down. In some ways, this will be one of the primary impacts of the new Democratic majority: The Bush administration will no longer be able to blithely exploit public apathy or inattention to silently destroy the regulatory state. --Ezra Klein
