There are plenty of ways to upend the workings of the federal government. There is the blunt-force approach: firing people, cutting budgets7bet gaming or sevenbet, eliminating agencies. That is what the Trump administration has been doing, and it has been generating plenty of headlines.

Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

But there are more subtle approaches that often escape public attention, like tweaking policies in ways that can have far-reaching effects. The Trump administration is doing this, too. One of its targets is the process agencies employ to evaluate the benefits and costs of their regulatory or deregulatory actions.

Cost-benefit analysis is the primary tool that policymakers use in developing and assessing regulations. But the results are only as good as the information that is used to generate them. The Trump administration wants to change the data that’s used in these analyses to arbitrarily reduce the dollar benefit of rules intended to protect individual and public health, the environment and worker safety.

In 2023,superace88 casino while I was administrator of the government’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I supervised a revision of this analytic process, which had last been updated in 2003. A lot had happened over the past 20 years, and that older approach was no longer consistent with the most recent scientific and economic developments. Nor did it reflect current market conditions.

President Trump recently ordered the Office of Management and Budget to revoke the 2023 update and return to the 2003 approach. Motivation aside, this is bad management. It will deprive government decision makers of an up-to-date way to determine whether the deregulation the White House is pursuing will make Americans better or worse off. Important government decisions will be based on obsolete data and economics.

Perhaps the most significant change in the 2023 revision was to update what’s known as the discount rate — the measure that aims to value the consequences of a regulation today when its impact might not be felt until well into the future. The benefits of a regulation generally need to justify the costs. But assessing the value of a rule is tricky when costs, such as requirements that companies install pollution-control equipment, are borne in the near term, but benefits, including reductions in mortality, cancer or lost work days, often accrue over decades.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.7bet gaming or sevenbet