This article in the Federal Times from Ruth Y. Goldway, Chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, argues that her agency's program of having a designated public representative explicitly representing the public interest in the agency decisionmaking process improves outcomes. As Goldway explains:
[T]he public representatives identify and discuss issues that would not otherwise be fully addressed on the record. . . . Since the establishment of the program, nearly every commission decision references comments from the public representative, and those comments have often made a substantive contribution to the record.
