Venable partner John Cooney has been named as a public member to the Administrative Conference of the United States, a newly-revived independent federal agency providing authoritative, nonpartisan legal advice and expertise on administrative law and federal regulatory procedures.
Mr. Cooney focuses his practice on economic regulatory, administrative and constitutional litigation involving federal agencies at the trial and appellate levels. Prior to joining Venable, Mr. Cooney served in the Reagan Administration as Assistant to the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice and as Deputy General Counsel for Litigation and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. He processed President Reagan’s original Executive Order on Federalism.
Mr. Cooney is one of 40 prominent attorneys and professors who were named members to the Administrative Conference of the US. They will be joining 50 senior federal officials and notable administrative law experts at the Conference, an in-house federal laboratory designed to optimize the performance of federal agencies. The Conference was reestablished by President Obama on July 8, 2010.
The Conference’s mission is to improve how federal agencies interact with citizens and businesses in regulatory and adjudicatory functions. The Conference is designed to help improve agency performance and responsiveness by emphasizing the values of efficiency, fairness, and satisfaction. Over the years, the Conference has approved more than 200 recommendations for improved agency decision-making, enlightened judicial oversight of the administrative process and creative statutory proposals.
Mr. Cooney has recently been in the news for his successful representation of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit by oil service firms seeking to overturn the government's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill.