Hello. My name is Roger Severino, vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. Today, we’ll be talking about what it means to be a regulator in a federal agency. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving.

Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. I want you to do a thought experiment. Think about how the federal government impacts your daily life. Now you might think, well, they keep our borders secure.

They keep our country safe with the military. You may have to pay taxes, but what people don’t often think about are the thousands upon thousands of regulations that govern the width of the hallway you walk by, the height of, for example, the outlets in your home. There’s millions of ways that federal regulations are impacting your lives right now, often for the worse and sometimes for the better. Now, if you’re interested in working in federal service and for the federal government, you have a few options. You’re either going to be handing out money and a lot of federal programs, You’re gonna be working in some form of law enforcement.

I already mentioned the national defense and the international sphere, but a large part of what the federal government does is issue guidance and regulations that govern the way we live. Regulations have the force and effect of law. It’s not what the founders imagined, but it’s what we have now. We’re ruled not so much by a system of laws, but a system of bureaucratic regulations. Now I happen to have been a regulator for 4 years under the Trump administration.

I was head of the office for civil rights at the US Department of Health and Human Services. I was prepared for many things. It was a controversial office because we dealt with things like gender identity and abortion in health care, and I expected those sorts of outside attacks and a lot of scrutiny. What I was not prepared for was the amount of lobbyists that came knocking on my door, and this was because part of the job was that I was the nation’s HIPAA regulator. And as a HIPAA regulator, Congress had given me tremendous power over what happens in hospitals, who can be seen and not seen when it comes to patients and the information exchange, the safeguarding of health information and documents, electronic records.

It was just an amazing amount of authority that was given to 1 person in one office. When there’s so much power given to 1 person, the lobbyists come out of the woodwork. And I remember one example where you had a member of congress sitting in my office and a lobbyist, and they were trying to convince me to give a protectionist handout to a segment of the document management industry because they made a lot of money on managing HIPAA related documents. Now I had these folks in my office only because I had the ability to issue regulations that would protect or harm this industry’s business model. Now that’s not exactly what the founders envisioned as to how our government should run, but I use that as an illustration as to tremendous amount of authority you would have if you work on regulations.

Now in my case, I followed the law. I was not persuaded by the lobbyists’ arguments. You have to answer first to the Constitution, to the law, and to the president because it is the president’s authority that you’re ultimately executing. But you gotta realize that all the action now happens at the regulatory levels. Just think back as to what happened with COVID.

You had guidance, not even regulatory action, from Fauci that was used to impose the lockdowns and the mask mandates, and that was followed up with regulations that was gonna impose a mandatory vaccination regime on the American worker. Imagine that. Congress never spoke to any of those things, but it was through regulation that they issued a mandatory vax mandate on the majority of Americans. Our system has moved away from lawmaking where congress is the one that issues the rules to regulators that issue the rules. So for those of you who are interested in serving in the next conservative administration, I highly recommend you become familiar with the regulatory process.

That is where the action is. That is how we are governed, often for the worse, today. So it behooves us as conservatives to learn the rules of the road, learn the processes, learn the pitfalls that are involved, because that is where we could have the biggest impact on the biggest number of people. So let me walk you through the anatomy of the regulatory process. Now I’m gonna focus very specifically on regulations themselves.

There’s a form of regulation called negotiated rulemaking for highly regulated industries. That’s a technical area of law. I’m gonna focus on the broadest form of regulation, standard regulations. So what is a regulation? It is little more than a federal bureaucracy interpreting existing statutes passed by Congress that do have the force and effect of law.

If there’s any gap, any ambiguity, any conflict that’s visible in any federal statute, if Congress empowers an agency to issue regulations, they have the power to fill in all those gaps to resolve the ambiguities. Right now, before the Supreme Court, they’re considering what’s known as the Chevron doctrine. That is a doctrine that says federal agencies have the ability to resolve ambiguities, and they get the benefit of the doubt. Again, this gives tremendous power to federal agencies where not even judges can overrule what the federal bureaucrats decide when they fill in the gaps according to their own lights. Now we’ve seen the Biden administration run wild with this power, reinterpreting statutes in ways that congress never considered.

The most obvious one to my mind is redefining male and female to include a whole panoply of gender identities. When congress decided that male and female under anti discrimination law was binary, federal agencies have now reinterpreted that to say, no. We think it’s something absolutely subjective, not related to biology, and we, the federal bureaucrats, have the power to impose that on American people in health care and in education and in law enforcement when it comes to anti discrimination. So that’s one example where federal agencies will step in to fill in the gap in ambiguities, which means we have to be ready to undo all of the regulatory excesses of the current administration, which means we need to know the rules of the road when it comes to rulemaking. What is the process for a rulemaking?

There are 2 ways. You have existing rules that need to be undone, and then there are rules that need to be added that are brand new or whole cloth. They generally follow the same process, though. You have a regulatory agenda that’s run through OMB. Every federal agency has to identify major rules on the horizon and disclose them to OMB, which will then in turn disclose it to the American public.

This is called the regulatory agenda in the spring and in the fall. It is a administrative foul if you do not disclose the regulatory agenda. The agencies cannot hide the ball and spring it on the public. They’d have to justify it and have very good reasons before they do so. So get familiar with the regulatory agenda.

It’s on reginfo.gov, and you’ll see what it looks like. Generally speaking, it doesn’t say very much. It is just the top line question of what a regulation is attempting to address, usually one sentence if that, and it shows the agency that would be issuing it. That is often enough to get a clue as to what is really gonna be going on, especially if it’s a follow on on previous regulations. So once the regulatory agenda is published, the public has a right to request what is known as a 12 866 meeting.

This is an executive order that has been around for decades that says the public can comment through phone generally by requesting a meeting with OMB, and they would also request it with the sponsoring agency of the rat reg of that regulation. So you have the regulatory agenda. People will spot an regulation that they’re interested in commenting on. They will request a 12 8 6 6 meeting. OMB will listen to their comments and take, any documents that are submitted as well, and they can include that in what is known as the administrative record.

What is important about an administrative record? It is the basis upon which every agency decides a question in a regulation. So when they’re receiving comments from the public through 12 866 meetings or otherwise, they are building the administrative record that will support their decision making for the final rule. A point about the administrative record. At the end of the process, when you’re getting close to wrapping everything up, you finalize the rule, you have to compile the administrative record.

That means all these studies you relied on, all the comments that you received, all the inputs that were a basis for your decision making has to be put together in one place, compiled to the as the administrative record, and then that will be submitted in court. You don’t wanna be in a situation where you get sued within 30 days of the rule becoming final. The court says, okay. Come up with the administrative record, and you’re scrambling to put paper together. Have a process up front that that tracks everything you’re using to support your decision making.

So you have the 1286 meet 866 meetings followed by the drafting of the regulation itself. This is normally done internally, and you get internal clearance within the agency. Sometimes, depending on the topic, you may have to involve other agencies of the federal government, especially if it’s something like a civil rights law, where there’s standing executive orders that say DOJ would coordinate that sort of regulatory function. So it all depends on what agency, on what topic, how much collaboration with other federal agencies is required in the initial drafting stage. At the very least, internal to the agency, you’re gonna have to get clearance with other components.

So at HHS, when we had a regulation on HIPAA, we have to include other components of HHS to get sign off because their interest or their jurisdictions might also be involved. Once you go through that process, the internal review, it is then ready to send back to OMB for review with other agencies. Once that process is done, you get the comments from the other agencies. You incorporate them as you will. If there’s any conflicts, it goes through OMB.

Sometimes it gets elevated to the president. At this stage, it is all behind the scenes. You have to be very careful with leaks. Some of the best regulations were torpedoed because of incautious handling of documents or sometimes internal intentional leaks to the media. So at that stage, having confidential processes are paramount.

You want to be able to have an open exchange within your agency, with other federal agencies, with the White House to discuss how we’re gonna shape this policy without having the media as another party to those discussions. Once you get through the interagency review process, you are ready to issue what’s known as an NPRM, a notice of proposed rulemaking. The NPRM is public. It is put out on the web, and you give a deadline for the public to comment on. Once you have an NPRM out there, you’re gonna start getting the media inquiries, so you should be absolutely prepared for it at that stage and actually beforehand.

It is there for public inspection. Your NPRM contains the actual rule itself, the regulatory text. You’re going to be editing the combined federal register. That is the repository of all federal regulations. It would stack halfway up to the ceiling or beyond if I would have just listed for HHS how many pages and pages of reg text is involved.

So you have regulatory text it could be quite long, it could be quite short. That is the essential equivalent of a statute that you’re going to be pulling putting into the regulatory code. That is gonna have the force and effect of law. That will be paired with a very long, what’s called, preamble, which is the entire analysis justifying your rule. That analysis could be legal, and it will very likely include the legal justifications and the authority you have to issue the regulation to begin with.

So the first step you have to realize is, do you have the authority to issue a regulation? What statutes can you point to that says you can issue a regulation? The more explicit Congress is in granting the agency the authority, the stronger the case is that you have the ability to issue these regulations. So cite the, the legislative authority, the grant that Congress gave your agency to do the rule making. Then you have to explain briefly in the introduction what the rule is gonna do, which means there has to be a need to be addressed.

Now, hopefully, the next administration will be undoing a wealth of regulations that were misguided from the previous administration. So there is your justification right there. The previous regulation that was put into place was a bad one, so you have to cite why it was. It could be defective policy reasons. It could be that we tried it, and what they promised would happen did not happen.

It could be that it’s legally defective, but you have to posit a justification for undoing a bad rule. So let’s take the affirmative case where you want to put forward a rule on your own, let’s say, brand new. Hopefully, you will have some sort of studies that you could cite to that would identify the problem, the extent of the problem, and how this regulation will help solve it. That means before you get to the NPRM stage, you will have gotten input from the public through various ways. It could be from advocacy organizations.

It could be from academic research, calling experts in. We held listening sessions before we issued NPRMs when I was head of the civil rights office, and those listening sessions were invaluable. You will get experts who will come in, and they will have done an amount an amazing amount of research already that you could plumb for and use for the administrative record. Again, you have to make the argument. You also have to support the argument with the evidence.

You can make policy arguments as well. You could say that these are the policies that this president has been pushing, and you can rely on executive orders that lay out the policies of the administration. That is a perfectly valid, legitimate basis of authority. In fact, that’s how it should be. Elections have consequences.

When a president enters into office, that president brings the agenda that the American people had entrusted into his or her hands. The agencies have to execute on that agenda, so definitely cite executive orders whenever you can to support your rulemaking. Now some people would suggest, well, you cannot have an agenda coming in to a regulation. That is false. You could come in with an agenda.

You say you are intending to undo this rule or intending to fix this issue with this regulation, and you could say that very candidly beforehand. What you cannot do is say, we’re gonna close our ears and close our eyes, and we’re not gonna take any input, that would be relevant to the question. Right? So to that extent, you have to have an open mind, but you could absolutely come in with an agenda ready to go, saying, we are elected to do this, the president has ordered us to implement this agenda, it’s for the benefit of the American people, here are the reasons why. List out those reasons, you support it, you do an economic analysis on top of it, right?

Almost everything you do in a federal regulation will have some sort of economic impact. You have to figure out the benefits and the burdens to do a cost benefit analysis. You will often rely on economists and professional staff to provide you that help in doing the regulatory impact analysis. And you’re gonna get a bottom line dollar amount. This is how much benefit there will be to society in dollars and cents, and here are the costs.

Often, you will use something called the VSL, the value of a statistical life. That actually puts a dollar amount on a human life. Now that may be sound cold and calculating, but it is used all the time, for example, to say if you’re to impose a burden ostensibly to save lives, how much is it gonna cost? And you have to cost it out and say it will be worth the cost. There are certain costs that you cannot quantify, and that’s absolutely legitimate as well.

I enforce civil rights through our regulations, and we absolutely said the benefit of human dignity in enforcing civil rights is a benefit that has to be considered. We could not put a dollar amount on it. However, when we said you have to put a notice of nondiscrimination in insurance documents, we were able to figure out this is how much the printing costs, this is how much the ink costs, this is how much the postage is gonna cost in mailing out these things, and we use that to to pare back on the regulatory burden. Right? We saved 1,000,000,000 of dollars on that because we went through the effort of costing it out and realizing it was a waste of money compared to the very limited benefit these notices were providing.

So So you do the cost benefit analysis to support and justify that this is a rule that is worth undertaking. So you’ve done the analysis, you’ve done your preamble, you’ve done all that hard work, You’re ready to issue the NPRM. It’s made available to the public, and then you say, we are taking comments. This is a crucial portion of the regulatory process. You have to take in every comment that the public submits.

It’s often gonna be now all by web, and they could type out their comments. They could have industry comments. You could have advocacy organizations. They range from as short as a postcard side comment saying I oppose this rule or I support it, or it could be the equivalent of a treatise that goes through its own regulatory impact analysis, its own legal analysis, and it could be very sophisticated. You’re gonna get a whole range, and it’s a good thing that you get this amount of comments.

When I was working on rules, the comments we received on the Civil Rights Office were in the 100 of 1,000. Now we dealt with issues like abortion and transgender, cross sex surgeries, those sorts of things, so you’re gonna get in that area a whole lot of public interest and a lot of scrutiny. You still have to consider every single comment that goes through your door, which means you have to have a process to sort them. There are ways that you could deduplicate a lot of the comments that are literal cut and paste. You’ll have campaigns that organizations will put together So long as you have not unreasonable deduplication process, then you could batch them and say, these are functionally identical, therefore, we only need to read one of them because the only difference is the name of the person, the substance is the same.

So that way, you’ll be able to save a tremendous amount of time. We had to hire contractors to deal with the volume, so you have to plan ahead to deal with the potential volume of comments. You need a mechanism to sort and categorize them. You have to be able to say, these are the commons dealing with economic analysis, these are the commons dealing with, say, social policy, these are the commons dealing with the value of human life, or if you’re doing environmental policy, this environmental aspect, you have to be able to categorize the comments by topic. You do the work by that by that function, then you could address it on the merits.

You have to address all meritorious comments. You don’t have to address a comment that says, I’m in favor, I’m against, because that doesn’t really impact the rulemaking. It’s not a democratic process in that way. It’s not majority vote. Who does the nitty gritty work of reading the comments and responding, etc?

Well, it varies. You could hire contractors to do the initial sorting and categorization. You’d need to have somebody with government authority, however, to come over come up with the arguments themselves to respond to the comments. You need to have somebody with political oversight to, at the very least, review those responses to the comments. Don’t be afraid, however, of relying on career staff.

You’ve heard a lot about the deep state and the opposition, a lot of folks in the federal government have to conservative policies. There’s tremendous truth in that. However, there are many professionals who are there to execute their job, and that job means you take the orders from the president on down to make sure the policy that the American people elected are actually put into the regulations. So long as there’s sufficient oversight as to what career folks are doing, rely on the career folks. They’ve been through the process.

If you get them on your side, they will help you find those landmines and those technical details that you have to do that don’t trip you up. Otherwise, you might be flying on your own. If you get in a bit oppositional relationship with career staff, they may find an error and not tell you about it, and you don’t want to be in a position at the end of it having those unforced errors because you have a adversarial relationship with career staff. There’s all sorts of technical expertise from scientific to economic with regulatory writing that career staff know quite well, but always remember, the ultimate policy decisions are for the appointees themselves. You will have been put in a position of authority to execute the will of the people, and you must hold firm on that.

You should hear the arguments of career staff on the policy matters just as you have to hear the arguments from the public as to where the policy should go, but the ultimate policy decision rests with the president and the executive branch and the policies implemented by that administration. So do not give in on that. You could have a lopsided, system of comments, and you could expect some. The left will really organize these postcard campaigns to flood the agency with comments to try to say that the public is opposed to it. So even if they have a more successful commenting strategy in terms of volume, it doesn’t mean you’re bound by a simple majority rule to go one way or the other, right?

So what does matter are these substantive comments. Every substantive comment has to be responded to, because if you don’t, you’re going to invite a lawsuit that will enjoin and block your rule, and all the work you’ve done for a year to a year and a half will go up in smoke. The left is going to try to block every one of our rules by going to very liberal judges in handpicked districts. They did that under the Trump administration. They’ll do it in any future conservative administration as well.

If you do not respond to a substantive comment, they will have known this, and they’ll go to a judge and say, your honor, they had the obligation to respond. They did not respond. Please Please block the rule, and a liberal judge will say, well, thank you. You’ve just made it very easy. I don’t have to get into the weeds of seeing whether or not it was lawful or unlawful on the merits.

They did a technical foul. Therefore, I have the ability to block the rule, and then that rule is now tied up in court and enjoined and not in effect. You do not want that to happen, which means you have to make sure that no comment was left behind or missed, which means you should actually take very pay very close attention to the most sophisticated comments because they will generally include the major arguments. So focus heavily on the advocacy organizations, the sophisticated comments, and then you’ll get a good sense of, okay. These are the main arguments we absolutely have to deal with.

Once you have that process in place, address every comment. It does not mean that you have to have the winning argument in every respect. You should, and you have to make every effort to have that result, but I’m speaking legally. Even if you you get a draw on the merits, you responded to the argument, the judge is bound to say, well, there are equal arguments on either side. Agency, they get the ties.

They the tie goes to the agency, and the rule stands. It’s even more generous than that as long as you have a reasonable basis for your rule. If it’s a policy dispute, it’s a policy dispute, and elections have consequences, and a judge is not empowered to say, but this is a better policy compared to the agency policy. Judges aren’t supposed to be policymakers. Federal agencies aren’t supposed to be policymakers, but the way they are now, that’s what they do.

So if you’re gonna be that policymaker, win the policy argument on the merits, but know that in court, if it’s a dispute over policy, you should win anyway, which means the crucial part is make sure every argument is addressed and you spell out your reasons. The technicalities matter. Here are some of the technicalities you’re gonna have to deal with. Paperwork Reduction Act. There are limits on how much you could produce without doing a proper analysis of the paperwork impact.

Plain language requirements, your regulation should be in plain language. Tribal consultations, did you consult with federal tribes? That’s a big one. Sometimes you’re required to, and you don’t want to end up in a position where you didn’t consult the tribes when you were required to, and you got to go back to the drawing board. Impact on small businesses, impact on federalism, impact on families, that’s a very important one for conservatives.

We have to be very strong on how this rule helps American families instead of hurts them. You have to do all these technical analyses on these major rules. Make sure you go through that process, and it turns out to be a template. There’s a checklist that’s pretty well developed, just make sure you go through the checklist and you’re gonna be fine. Here is the key legal standard.

The phrase arbitrary and capricious is something you’re gonna come to know and love as a regulator. That is the standard that actually governs you under the Administrative Procedure Act. That is the number one basis for lawsuits against your regulations. There’s the technical fouls, and then there are the substantive fouls. The substantive ones are whether or not you engaged in reasoned decision making.

Remember how I said earlier, you could come in with an agenda, you could come in with pre planned strategies, you still have to spell it all out as to why this is good policy. You cannot simply say, because this is what the American people want. You have to say, here are the reasons why this is good policy. Once you spell it all out, the left is gonna attack you and say, well, those reasons aren’t good enough. That’s not the legal standard.

The legal standard is, are those reasons arbitrary and capricious? It’s a pretty low bar to pass. The left though is gonna push hard on that. They’re gonna try to go after you by saying, well, you argued x here, and you argued the exact opposite elsewhere in your rule. Be aware of that.

That could open you up to an arbitrary and capricious challenge. Consistency is extraordinarily important on this. If you take a position in a rule as to how this rule is gonna do some good for the country, You can’t, later on in a rule, say that it’s actually a bad thing if the rule is gonna have that effect. It makes it sound arbitrary and capricious. Capricious, that sort of things, deals with questions of favoritism.

If you’re doing things that aren’t really in the public interest, things that act on a whim, the way you could get in trouble there is if you just don’t spell out the reasons. If the courts suspect there’s something going on behind the scenes that is really driving this decision making, you might get some suspicion that could end up in joining your rule. There are limits into how far a court could probe into that question, but don’t give them the excuse. All of your rule rulemaking is going to have good, strong policy rationales. We’ve outlined so many of them in our Project 2025 book, The Mandate For Leadership.

You’re going to have plenty to work with If you have done the due diligence and gotten the studies and gotten input from advocacy groups, etc, and built that record, you’re gonna be fine, but you have to show your work. That is the name of the game. Show your work, and then you’ll be able to survive the legal challenges that are absolutely going to come. I’ll give you a few examples where things didn’t go right in the rulemaking process. We had one rule where we took comments, and because of the time pressures, we used sampling instead of reading each individual comment.

Now in various areas, sampling is perfectly appropriate to find and get a representation of what their arguments are. A court struck it down. They said that was cutting a corner. Every single comment has to get an eyeball on it or you use a proper deduplication software. You can’t take samples and say that’s representative, that’s a violation.

Avoid giving the left any excuse on technicalities. Another case, we had rulemaking where a federal judge said, well, there was another court decision that came out 3 days before you finalized the rule, even though you publicly published the rule, but 3 days beforehand, this court decision came out. It was arbitrary and capricious for you not to take into account that decision. That was a wrong court decision, it was a left wing judge trying to do left wing things, but you see how far it goes. That delayed us and tied us up, and it was quite effective in blocking our rule.

So that’s one thing to consider think ahead, what are the arguments that the Left can make to say you failed to consider X? What is that X? So long as you identify it, and consider it, and give your reasons, that should be enough. So look around the corner, this is a game of 3 d chess. You have to be always anticipating what the Left is gonna do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.

So what if you’re the actual worker bee working on a regulation for the first time? It could appear to be very daunting. It’s highly technical in many ways, it’s highly legal in a lot of ways, but don’t be intimidated. Use models of previous regulations as a template. Rely on that and say, okay.

This is how it’s done. Right now, start getting familiar with regulations. It’s something I recommend to everybody. File a comment on regulations. Again, it’s available to everybody in the public.

You go to regulations.gov, you find a comment you’re interested in, especially now under Biden, you file a comment in opposition, and you explain the reasons why, and lo and behold, they are on the other side, have to read and respond to your comment. That’s incredibly powerful, and once you get familiar with that process, you could see what it’s like on the other side when you start to draft the agency regulations. You have to be aware of where that regulation fits in with the broad scheme of other regulations. It could be part of a multi faceted regulatory regime. It could be something that’s a stand alone.

You got to be aware of the context of where your piece fits in. Are you using any terms of art that are defined elsewhere in the code? How are you using it? Right? The word person, for example, there’s a default definition of the word person in federal statutes.

Are you gonna stick with that, or do you mean something else? Do you need to define terms? A lot of regulations will have a section of definitions, so you could define your terms, so you know exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish. And then when it comes to the regulatory text itself, you’re generally requiring somebody to do something or else, right? Most regulations are that form.

You’re requiring somebody, which means you have to identify that somebody to do something, identify the act, or else what are the consequences of non compliance? All those things are very important to put in place, and once you think through that process, that will help you with your regulatory impact analysis. If you know who’s gonna be impacted, who’s gonna be affected, and how, you could put that into your economic analysis and your RIA to make sure that all your arguments are supported, and you flag all the consequences of your rulemaking. Now I’m gonna focus a bit on time. When you are a political appointee, your most precious commodity is your time.

The clock is ticking. I had a colleague of mine who had a reverse countdown that showed how many days, hours, and minutes were left for the 1st 4 years of the administration. And I was on his desk, and he could see it every day. And I recommend some of you do the same thing, be aware of that ticking clock. One of the errors we made in the previous administration was we spent too much time in the interagency process and in the regulatory drafting so that when those inevitable court challenges came, we didn’t have enough time to litigate it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

What ended up happening is we would get enjoined at the district court level, and then it’d go up to the appeals. We’d get to the appeals, and, unfortunately, so many of our regulations ended there because the Biden folks came in, and they immediately abandoned the defense of those rules. Of course, they should have been defending legitimate rules. If they wanted to change it, they should propose replacements, but they abandoned the rules at the courts. Now that means we’ll be able to do the same, which is why the Biden administration is rushing to get their regulations through before their clock is ticking.

So you must have the timeline in your head. It’ll take this much time to do the analysis, to compile the evidence, to issue the NPRM, to receive the comments, to sort the comments, to respond to the comments, and to finalize a rule explaining our response to the comments. It’s one thing I should have mentioned earlier. When you finalize a rule, you must actually respond to the comments in writing there. You show your work, and that’s what I meant by showing your work.

Time it so that you could litigate all the way to the Supreme Court. One of our success stories on that front was the little sisters of the poor case. If you remember, the Obama administration, through Obamacare, had forced the little sisters of the poor, an order of nuns, to help provide insurance coverage for contraceptives for fellow nuns. Clear violation of religious liberty. It was done through a regulation.

It was litigated in the courts, and we, under Trump, undid that regulation based on an executive order. So here was a process. The president, early on in the administration, within a couple months of taking the oath, issued a religious liberty executive order, cited the Little Sisters of the Poor issue, and said the agency should consider rulemaking. HHS took those orders, did the the internal meetings, issued the NPRM, took the comments, did the rule in final form with enough time to litigate it all the way to the Supreme Court where we won. That is a success story that needs to be replicated.

The reason we succeeded there is because it was done at the very beginning with that executive order, the marching orders that opened up all the doors. The interagency process was difficult, but it happened in a timely fashion, and we were able to get that permanent victory. That’s your goal, to get those permanent regulatory victories. One of the most fulfilling aspects of my time serving in the Trump administration was in my role as a regulator, especially during COVID. You’ll remember that in the middle of COVID, hospitals were turning people away to make space and save beds for people with COVID.

This means that many treatable illnesses were being left behind, and people’s lives were being put at risk. There was a question as to whether or not doctors could do remote telehealth because of HIPAA regulations. As a regulator, we took the policy position that we will not enforce HIPAA under those circumstances, and from that came the explosion of telehealth that we are now experiencing today. It was in my role as a regulator. We were able to take those decisions that I believe saved lives, and that just gives you an example of the tremendous satisfaction you could get if you choose to serve in the capacity as a regulator.

You don’t have to be the decision making yourself yourself. You don’t have to be the decision maker yourself. You could be supporting it. You could be drafting the regulations. You could be working on the guidance.

You could be coming up with the policy justifications that will save lives. At the end of the process, after all the hard work, if you’ve done it such that you did the work at the front end, you follow the rules, you got it through litigation, you did it in enough time to go all the way to the Supreme Court, you’ll look back and say, I made a difference, and it’s a story you’ll be able to tell with pride to your kids and grandkids by saying when the time came and I was called to serve, I did my part. Thank you.