The Biden administration’s initiative to modernize regulatory review, while attempting to incorporate various criticisms of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), was hobbled by an insufficient theoretical analysis. Specifically, the administration failed to address its implicit naturalization of the economic subject, under which subjects and their preferences are regarded as exogenous givens. The justification for CBA is that it can use information regarding individual “willingness to pay” (WTP) or “willingness to accept” (WTA) to discern these preferences, and thereby create efficient policy. But if the naturalized subject is fictional, then there is nothing to discern. Subjects and their preferences are not waiting to be found; rather, they are endogenously shaped. Recognition of this endogeneity would allow for preferences, or values, constituted through democratic spaces to be no less salient to policy than those ostensibly exogenous to the market. Further, it would allow for regulatory institutions themselves to serve as those democratic spaces.