1. See, for example, Ackerman and Hassler, Clean Coal/Dirty Air; Stewart, "The Reformation of American Administrative Law." [BACK]

2. 5 U.S.C. secs. 551-59 (1976). [BACK]

3. Administrative Conference of the United States, Recommendation 78-4 (adopted December 14-15, 1978), 7. [BACK]

4. For example, Executive Order 12291, 1981. [BACK]

5. This prescription, common on the public side, has recently been applied to the private sector as well. See Johnson, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Voluntary Safety Standards, sec. 4. [BACK]

6. Stewart, "The Reformation of American Administrative Law." [BACK]

7. For the traditional "capture" theory, see Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent Commission. For the revised theory that includes capture by environmental groups, see R. Shep Melnick, Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1983). [BACK]

8. Stewart, "The Reformation of American Administrative Law," 1807. [BACK]

9. Herbert Simon, "Rationality as Process and Product of Thought" (Richard T. Ely Lecture to the American Economics Association), Proceedings of the American Economics Association, May 1978, 14. [BACK]

10. S. John Byington, CPSC chairman, "Transcript of Public Meeting on Unvented Gas-fired Space Heaters, March 6, 1978, Washington, D.C.," 68. [BACK]

11. In March 1982, for example, draft revisions of Z21.11.2 were sent by AGA Labs to 416 potentially interested parties for comment, including 11 manufacturers, 185 gas companies, and 220 other groups, primarily state and local jurisdictions. [BACK]

12. The FAA received hundreds of postcards and letters supporting a rule it already planned to adopt. OSHA, on the other hand, received thousands of objections from farmers it knew were opposed to the rule, but the agency remained committed to it. [BACK]

14. They might still be influenced, of course, by the knowledge that a "balanced" committee will review their work. Based on the attitudes of those interviewed for this study, however, this does not seem likely. Technical committee members openly refer to the Z21 committee as a "rubber stamp." It is hard to imagine how this committee, meeting only once a year, could exercise meaningful review over the forty-seven standards under its jurisdiction. Those canvassed about UL's standards carry even less clout, since UL admits that it submits its standards to ANSI only as a courtesy. If that "reviewing" body rejected a UL standard, the organization would simply publish it without the ANSI imprimatur. Only the review processes at NFPA appears likely to affect technical committee decisionmaking. [BACK]

15. The standard, Hydraulic Institute 100, was challenged by ASME at the ANSI Board of Standards Review meeting of November 15, 1984. [BACK]

16. Robert Lacey, Ford: The Man and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), 579. [BACK]

17. 5 U.S. C. see. 553 (1976). [BACK]

18. John H. Young, "Direct Interest Participation in the Regulatory Decision Process" (Staff paper prepared for the Office of Technology Development, May 5, 1983), 12. [BACK]

19. Membership on UL's Industry Advisory Conferences (IAC) is limited "to employees of manufacturers who are subscribers to UL's Follow-up Service in the product category." At a two-day gathering in November 1978, for example, UL engineers met with representatives of ten woodstove manufacturers and seven "invited guests," either trade association representatives or manufacturers of related products such as fireplace inserts and venting equipment. [BACK]

20. American National Standards Institute, "Procedures for the Development and Coordination of American National Standards," April 1983, appendix A, sec. A7, p. 14. [BACK]

21. Basically, critics complain that outside participation comes too late in the UL process. First, there is no outside participation in the drafting of informal "desk standards." Second, the canvass process takes place after there have been give-and-take sessions between UL and industry interests. The latter do not shape the standard nearly so much as the former. [BACK]

22. On the creosote issue, UL told concerned commenters that it expected current research "within the scientific and technical community [to] provide a data base upon which a [creosote] test might be developed" (UL letter of November 26, 1979, to John Schulz, NFPA Technical Committee member). In fact, UL did not (and does not) intend to develop a creosote test, even though a test method has been developed by a woodstove consultant who operates a testing lab. [BACK]

23. See chapter 10, note 18. [BACK]

24. John H. Young, "Direct Interest Participation in the Regulatory Decision Process," 69. [BACK]

25. David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process (New York: Free Press, 1970). [BACK]

26. Johnson, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Voluntary Safety Standards, 37-51. [BACK]

27. Actually, UL did it once, when it acted as an "offeror" in the CPSC's proceedings on television receivers. UL spent several hundred thousand dollars on that standard, conducting a full-blown cost-benefit analysis and trying to encourage consumers to participate. By most accounts, the venture failed. The CPSC never adopted the standard prepared by UL. The proceedings were marked by hostile exchanges between UL and the CPSC, leading some observers to conclude that UL set out with the intention to demonstrate that this technique of standards-setting would not work. A UL engineer, citing the case of television receiver, says that UL should "never again do cost-benefit analysis." [BACK]

28. The "Report of the NFPA Systems Concepts Committee on Cost/Benefit Statements" was circulated to all Technical Committee members by order of the Standards Council in July 1985 (NFPA Standards Council Meeting Minutes, Item 84-20, reprinted in Fire Journal, January 1986, 77). [BACK]

29. See, generally, Serge Taylor, Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Statement Strategy of Administrative Reform, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1984). [BACK]

30. Breyer, Regulation and Its Reform, 98. [BACK]

31. McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy, 138. [BACK]