Opinion: Azar’s ‘Sunset Rule’ will bring a dangerous new dawn for health regulation

Alex Azar, secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, spent his final days in office under fire for misleading states about the number of coronavirus vaccine doses they would receive this month. Unfortunately, the criticism didn’t deter Azar from closing out his tenure by making yet another promise his department can’t keep, one that puts thousands of existing health and safety protections at risk of automatic repeal.
Azar’s insidious new policy, known as the Sunset Rule , commits HHS to reassessing the economic impacts of almost every one of the department’s existing regulations and establishes an extreme penalty for noncompliance: If a regulation is not reviewed by its 10th anniversary, it simply blinks out of existence. Read the rest…