Did not want voters to know what was coming down post-election.

Prior to the 2012 election there were claims that the Obama administration was concealing its intentions by deliberately not moving proposed regulations forward so as to avoid campaign controversy.

Needless to say, the Obama campaign denied the charges then and now.

We reported on how delay of regulations damaged the rollout of Obamacare, Re-election 2012: HHS went quiet on Obamacare regs leading to healthcare.gov tech failure

The Washington Post reports on how organized the concealment and delay effort was, White House delayed enacting rules ahead of 2012 election to avoid controversy:

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials. Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said. The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what bodies of water deserved federal protection, pollution controls for industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace. The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection. The number and scope of delays under Obama went well beyond those of his predecessors, who helped shape rules but did not have the same formalized controls, said current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. Those findings are bolstered by a new report from the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent agency that advises the federal government on regulatory issues. The report is based on anonymous interviews with more than a dozen senior agency officials who worked with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which oversees the implementation of federal rules.



