On July 31, President Bush nominated Susan E. Dudley to serve as head the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which oversees the administration’s regulatory policies. Dudley currently directs the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University.

The choice has begun to draw criticism from a number of sources, which claim that Dudley’s Mercatus Center is an industry-friendly think-tank made up of scholars who criticize public health and safety regulations as unnecessary, too onerous or interfering with the free-market system. Dudley has authored several scholarly publications for the center criticizing certain OHS regulations.

Dudley served under two previous administrations. While with the EPA from 1984-85, Dudley helped develop the BEN model to estimate the economic benefit of noncompliance for the purpose of assessing civil penalties. She was a career economist in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB from 1985 to 1989 and served as an economic advisor to Commissioner William P. Albrecht at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1989 to 1991.