Center for Progressive Reform

The SBA’s Office of Advocacy Criticism of Its ‘Crain and Crain’ Report: A Dollar Short and A Day Late

by Sidney Shapiro

Call it buyer’s remorse. The Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration (SBA) is publicly—albeit meekly—tiptoeing away from a now-infamous report that it commissioned, in which economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain purported to find that federal regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion in 2008. After being roundly criticized by CPR, the Congressional Research Service, and others, SBA’s Office of Advocacy now explains, referring apparently to the $1.75 trillion figure that “the findings of the study have been taken out of context and certain theoretical estimates of costs have been presented publicly as verifiable facts.” While this admission is welcome, it does not go nearly far enough in light of the antiregulatory crusade this misleading, taxpayer-supported report fueled.

Soon after the Crain and Crain report was released in 2010, CPR published a White Paper that demonstrated the unreliability and implausibility of the Crain and Crain report’s methodologies and findings. A few months later, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) released its own analysis of the Crain and Crain report, and its findings were equally damning. Then the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) separately analyzed the Crain and Crain report, and concluded the Crain and Crain report was based on a “flawed economic model and faulty data.” All of this caused then Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to describe the study as “deeply flawed” and an “urban legend” in congressional testimony. And in addition to employing indefensible methodologies to support their calculations for costs, the Crain and Crain report’s authors ignored regulatory benefits, a move that ensured that the report’s findings would be ripe for precisely the kind of abuse and misuse by anti-regulatory forces that SBA’s Office of Advocacy is now trying to walk away from.

Sure enough, the fantastical $1.75 trillion dollar estimate has been cited time and time again by industry lobbyists and regulatory critics in Congress, even after the report itself had been debunked, to support troubling anti-regulatory legislation, such as the REINS Act. After handing this Christmas gift to the anti-regulatory forces, SBA’s Office of Advocacy owes the public something more than burying a begrudging acknowledgment of the report’s weakness on an obscure webpage.

When I wrote Dr. Winslow Sargeant, the head of the SBA Office of Advocacy, asking that his agency completely disavow the Crain and Crain report, he offered a disappointing response that attempted to rehabilitate the Crain and Crain report’s findings and methodology. So, it is encouraging that the SBA Office is now being a little more forthright in its criticisms of the report. Yet, the Crain and Crain report has so polluted the public debate over regulatory policy that this half step by SBA’s Office of Advocacy is plainly inadequate. It is time for the agency to disavow the report completely, remove any vestige of it from its website, and adopt procedures to ensure that it does not pay for and publicize similarly misleading research again. As a fiduciary of the public’s money, it owes nothing less.