n his job as overseer of regulatory agencies, James B. MacRae Jr., deep-sixed a Transportation Department proposal to require airlines to offer infant safety seats that might have saved the lives of children involved in airplane crashes. He turned thumbs down on OSHA plans to set exposure limits for more than 1,000 substances hazardous to workers. Agency officials condemned these decisions as "bizarre," "ridiculous" and "really loony."
Such attacks went with MacRae's job as regulatory disciplinarian at the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. MacRae served as deputy and acting administrator of OIRA during a period in which the office was so often at odds with federal agencies, Congress and public interest groups that Congress debated whether it should continue to exist. Yet MacRae, who retired from federal service in January, wins more praise than criticism, even from past opponents. "I strongly disagreed with him on the issues, but I greatly respected the man," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group. "He was a dedicated civil servant whose objective was always to improve the quality of government."
The current administrator of OIRA, Sally Katzen, whose liberal politics put her at odds with many decisions MacRae made during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, nevertheless describes him as "a quintessential civil servant. He is the best of what is unfortunately referred to as a bureaucrat."
"The outstanding quality Jim brought to his work was his deft touch," says Bernard Martin, deputy associate director of human resources at OMB and once MacRae's supervisor in the agency's legislative reference division. "There are a variety of ways in which you can do your work at OMB. You can take the high-handed approach. But Jim always came across, no matter who he was dealing with, as straightforward."
"He had an inclusive style, inclusive of people and ideas," says Katzen. "He listened, he would express a view. He worked calmly."
For his capable work, MacRae was recently named winner of the sixth annual Government Executive Leadership Award, recognizing superior achievement during a career in the federal service. The award is co-sponsored by the National Capital Area Chapter of the American Society of Public Administration.
From Diplomat to Analyst
MacRae was born 56 years ago in Fayette-ville, N.C., and grew up on the campus of North Carolina's Lincoln University, where his father was dean of students. A product of Quaker schools, he studied German at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He took the Foreign Service exam in his junior year, passing on his first try. By July 1963, two months after graduating, MacRae was one of the State Department's youngest Foreign Service officers, serving at the U.S. consulate in Bremen, Germany.
Two years later, he moved into management planning at State Department headquarters. There he noticed a number of his colleagues "were going off to this place called the Bureau of the Budget. These people over at the Bureau were junior in rank, but they were handling a lot of responsibilities."
So MacRae made the switch, too. The level of responsibility became clear to MacRae in his third day on the job. "I got a call from an assistant secretary of Labor," says MacRae. "He said, 'I'd like to come over and talk to you about my budget.' Well, you know the assistant secretary at the State Department was a demi-god! And the secretary, of course, was God. So you never talked to them directly. You saw them from a distance if you were lucky enough to be at a reception."
MacRae worked at the budget bureau (and its successor, OMB) for the remaining 31 years of his federal career, holding jobs on both the M and the B sides of the agency. "One of the ideals about senior executives in the career federal service is that they should move about and get a variety of experiences," says Martin. "This rarely happens. Jim MacRae is a sterling exception. He is one of the few people who has had the variety of experience that we say everybody ought to have."
In 1984, MacRae joined OIRA. He came to the office "with a tremendous knowledge of how OMB works and how government programs were organized," says Don Arbuckle, who was an OIRA staffer at the time and is now the office's deputy administrator. "His knowledge was invaluable to us."
OIRA was created in 1980 under the Paperwork Reduction Act. Soon after the office opened its doors in April 1981, President Reagan expanded OIRA's responsibilities to include reviewing government regulations. From that point on, OIRA's analysts had a license to hunt for any regulations they deemed intrusive. To the consternation of regulatory agencies, they were not shy about doing it.
Rejecting Regulations
MacRae defends controversial decisions he made to reject agencies' proposed regulations, saying that, "in my judgment and the staff's judgment, they were not positive in terms of cost-benefit analysis." It was OIRA's job, he says, to look for perverse and unintended effects that agencies, under the gun to crank out regulations, might have missed.
In the case of the Federal Aviation Administration's proposal to require child safety seats in airplanes, MacRae says, the regulation would have caused airlines to raise their prices, forcing families to do more traveling by car, which is a more dangerous means of transport.
In the case of OSHA's proposed exposure limits in the construction, maritime and agricultural industries, MacRae argued that the regulation would impose a high cost to companies that would cause job cuts, endangering workers more than if they were exposed to hazardous materials.
MacRae says, "What I like to think we at OIRA did was look at a simple question: Is the regulation going to do more good than harm?" However, others have argued that OIRA's decisions were not just based on open-minded analysis.
"The charge was that we were in bed with the regulated community and that they had undue access to us," says MacRae. "The environmental community, labor unions and others thought that they didn't have access and that we cut private deals."
In fact, says MacRae, "my preference was not to meet with people from the outside, even though I could do it when I was acting administrator. If a regulated entity had a good argument, then it was a good argument and they could put it on paper and send it in and let everybody see it. Of course, the problem is, a lot of law firms make money by delivering clients to some bureaucrat and saying, 'I actually got you in to see the decision-maker.' "MacRae says the rule at OIRA has always been, if a regulated entity schedules a meeting with the office administrator, a representative from the federal agency concerned is invited to attend.
Critics also suspected that business and industry groups influenced OIRA through Vice President Quayle's Council on Competitiveness during the Bush Administration. MacRae was called to testify before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in November 1991 to explain OIRA's association with the council. He testified that although the council did advise his office on regulatory matters-and that he could not think of a time when he did not heed the advice-"we figure things out for ourselves." He says today he can "only recall two issues that actually went to the full Council on Competitiveness."
In spite of the headaches that charges of secrecy have caused him in the past, MacRae staunchly believes there is a place for private discussion in the executive branch. "Up until the Reagan Administration came in," he says, "OMB and particularly the Bureau of the Budget talked quietly to the agencies. . . . We worked these things out behind closed doors, so there wasn't the necessity for public posturing. I won't kid you-I really liked that era. There are those that say, 'but we don't know what went on.' But I would turn around and say, ultimately, whatever OMB does and OIRA does is public information. That is, it's a budget that goes to the Hill, or it's a regulation that we have to comment on in public. . . . I support the power of the President to be able to confer with his or her appointees and decide what the policy's going to be before it's released to the public. If you don't have that, it seems to me, you don't have the means to faithfully carry out the laws."
"The Glue"
MacRae is widely commended for his work as acting chief of OIRA when it didn't have an appointed administrator and when the Paperwork Reduction Act was up for renewal-events which coincided. "He was the glue," says Katzen. MacRae, in fact, was acting administrator longer than any appointee has been administrator of OIRA.
MacRae's management style enabled him to attract and retain high-quality staffers at OIRA "that I am privileged to head today," Katzen says. "He fostered an environment in which they could maximize their effectiveness." Arbuckle agrees. "He expected branch chiefs to be responsible. His theory was, if you were the person who was the expert in the area, you should go ahead and do the work."
Then there was his personality. "He was not an aloof manager," says Arbuckle. "He loved to talk to people on the staff. And he was something of a raconteur. He could remember 14th century kings and he knew all about automobiles."
MacRae says he was always somewhat uncomfortable while serving as acting OIRA administrator, and happy to return to his career position of deputy administrator. "OIRA is designed to have a political head," he says, "who can sit in and discuss real political issues with the President's advisers. I'd usually try to absent myself from any kind of straight political talk."
Unlike most political appointees, MacRae was in the federal government for the long haul, and for one reason. "I am fascinated with problems and I like to be able to sit down and analyze what you do about them," he says. "I like to be able to raise questions and query people and roll up my sleeves and get in the mud and slog around and say, 'are there some ways we can go about solving this?' I think you really can make a dent in seemingly intractable problems if you've got good, sharp, clear-thinking, rational people and the analytic tools."
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