The analysis herein arises from the collision course between the sweeping reforms mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and a single sentence of the U.S. Code, adopted nearly fifteen years earlier and largely forgotten ever since. Few were likely thinking of Section 106 of the National Securities Market Improvement Act when the Dodd-Frank Act was enacted on July 21, 2010. As applied by the D.C. Circuit less than a year later in Business Roundtable v. SEC, however, that provision’s peculiar requirement of cost-benefit analysis could prove the new legislation’s undoing.
To help navigate this potential impasse, the Article that follows suggests the need to more carefully analyze the function and form of the cost-benefit analysis mandate in Section 106 and develops a generally applicable framework for doing so. Discussions of cost-benefit analysis have traditionally approached it as a fairly singular phenomenon—with broad aspirations of “efficiency” as its purpose and with its application in environmental and risk regulation understood to capture its form. In reality, cost-benefit analysis is both more ad hoc—and more systematically varied—than this account suggests.
The framework proposed herein thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complexities and varieties of cost-benefit analysis generally. In the particular case of Section 106, meanwhile, it counsels a distinct function and particular characteristics of form that will better direct its application—both to the myriad regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act and beyond. Properly understood, Section 106 is designed to encourage SEC attention to substantive considerations that might otherwise be neglected, given the Commission’s traditional focus on investor protection. As to form, Section 106 constitutes a true mandate and one properly subject to judicial review. Contrary to the analysis in Business Roundtable, however, that mandate is procedural rather than substantive in nature. By comparison with formal cost-benefit analysis, it is less rigidly quantitative. It does, however, demand careful attention to the distributional impacts of relevant rulemaking. To such particularized ends and in such tailored form, ultimately, cost-benefit analysis has the potential to generate significant insight—both under Section 106 and for financial regulation as a whole.
