“Too often, OIRA has been the place that regulations, even those whose measured benefits far outweighed the costs, went to die,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of Economic Policy Institute. “The next administrator should respect the agencies’ expertise and help them fulfill their statutory missions, not impede them. OIRA is not a super-agency or the handmaiden of industry, and it should never act that way.”

Similarly, independent observers have given low marks to Apple and Reebok’s purported attempts to democratize their affiliated factories in China.

Economics Policy Institute vice president Ross Eisenbrey, a dogged critic of labor conditions in the Chinese Foxconn factories where Apple and other major hardware companies have their products built, compared the Bangladeshi building collapse to the recent fertilizer plant explosionin West, Texas.

“If you think we can rely on businesses to self-regulate, think again,” he wrote. “West Fertilizer, the small business that blew up and killed fourteen people in Texas last week, declared itself safe and estimated the chance of a catastrophic explosion at zero. They needed someone with authority and the power to change behavior to look over their shoulder, to look out for the workers and first responders who were most at risk, and to look out for the school children whose schools were within the blast radius. But no agency had or exercised that authority.”

But the Advocacy study has also come under scrutiny from economists and legal scholars, who have challenged the methodology, the underlying data and the authors’ reluctance to share certain details about how they did their work. And while much of the criticism comes from liberal organizations like the Center for Progressive Reform and the Economic Policy Institute (which weighed in twice), here, too, the outrage is not strictly partisan: theCongressional Research Service has also cast doubt on the study’s findings.

But Josh Bivens, director of research and policy for the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said NERA’s job-forecasting model is flawed. Bivens accused the firm of trying “to play on totally-legitimate concerns about today’s weak labor market.”

…

But Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute said NERA’s methodology is misleading because it relies on a model that “assumes nobody who wants a job cannot find one, nor does anybody who separates from a job ever do it involuntarily.”

“This means that they have literally nothing at all to say about whether or not [regulations] will increase or decrease unemployment,” he said, adding that his research indicates the regulations in question would yield a modest boost in job creation over the coming years.

From 2007-2009, during the economic recession, the BLS found that government regulation accounted for around 4,300 layoffs – 0.3 percent of all those who lost their jobs. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted that these numbers are especially significant when compared with the number of jobs lost during the recession due to regulatory failures:

The 4,300 figure itself deserves further context. It does not take into account any offsetting job creation that the regulations may have spurred, such as jobs created from the increased demand for the products from companies in compliance with the regulations. More broadly, the 4,300 figure pales in comparison to any accounting of the jobs lost in this period due to the regulatory failures that contributed to the economy’s financial crisis.