The U.S. House approved two more anti-regulation bills this week. On February 4, all the Republicans present and nine Democrats passed the “Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015” by 250 votes to 173 (roll call). The following day, nineteen Democrats joined the whole GOP caucus to approve the “Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2015” by 260 votes to 163 (roll call).
Iowa Republicans Rod Blum (IA-01), David Young (IA-03), and Steve King (IA-04) voted for both bills. Democrat Dave Loebsack (IA-02) opposed them both; he also voted against last year’s version of the unfunded mandates bill.
The bill claiming to deal with unfunded mandates “would further require agencies to consult with private sector entities impacted by the proposed rules,” Cristina Marcos reported. The bill approved on Thursday “would require federal agencies to calculate the direct, as well as indirect, costs of proposed rules.”
I haven’t seen any public comment on these votes from the Iowans in Congress, but after the jump I enclose open letters from leaders of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, an alliance of more than 150 “consumer, small business, labor, scientific, research, good government, faith, community, health, environmental, and public interest groups.” They urged House members to reject the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act, because it “neither improves nor streamlines the regulatory process” and “would rob the American people of many critical upgrades to public health and safety standards, especially those that ensure clean air and water, safe food and consumer products, safe workplaces, and a stable, prosperous economy.” The same coalition opposed the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act, because it “would increase unnecessary and lengthy regulatory delays, increase undue influence by regulated industries and encourage convoluted court challenges.”
Votes like this fly under the radar as media pursue more news stories that interest the “core demographic.” That’s unfortunate, because this kind of non-glamorous policy-making could affect millions of people. Few Iowans will learn that under the guise of “cutting red tape,” our state’s Republicans in Congress would jeopardize rules that are meant to protect the public interest. Loebsack deserves credit for standing up against these bad bills. Major corporations and industries already have too much influence over government rules.
CSS Opposes the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015
January 27, 2015 / Congress
The Honorable Jason Chaffetz
Chairman
House of Representatives
Oversight & Government Reform Committee
Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings
Ranking Member
House of Representatives
Oversight & Government Reform Committee
Washington, DC 20515
RE: H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015
Dear Representative Chaffetz and Representative Cummings,The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, an alliance of over 150 labor, scientific, research, good government, faith, community, health, environmental, and public interest groups, strongly urges members of the Committee to oppose H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015 (UMITA).
The bill neither improves nor streamlines the regulatory process. The current regulatory process is already plagued by hurdles and lengthy delays. H.R. 50 would make it even more difficult for agencies to implement laws already enacted by Congress. If passed, this legislation would rob the American people of many critical upgrades to public health and safety standards, especially those that ensure clean air and water, safe food and consumer products, safe workplaces, and a stable, prosperous economy.
This legislation is premised on the false notion that agencies are not properly accounting for regulatory costs. Supporters of the bill ignore the fact that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has consistently found that the benefits of regulation overwhelmingly outweigh their costs. For example, OMB’s draft 2014 report to Congress aggregating costs and benefits of major federal regulations found that rules issued between 2003 and 2013 resulted in benefits ranging from $217 billion to $863 billion, compared to costs ranging from $57 billion to $84 billion.
Importantly, this report clarifies that the benefits derived from major regulations have vastly exceeded their costs, even using the most conservative estimates. There are few places one can go for such a positive return on investment, but U.S. health, safety, and environmental regulation is one of them. With this legislation, Congress would be making it harder, not easier, for our government to provide much-needed health and safety protections that produce enormous benefits to the public.
Supporters claim that this legislation is needed to force agencies to comply with the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA). Yet they overlook that agencies must already comply with up to 110 analytical and procedural requirements before they can act to address pressing public health and safety concerns.2 Many of these steps satisfy UMRA’s requirements. This new legislation will add even more redundancy and duplication that will cause further delay at federal agencies and more regulatory uncertainty for America’s businesses.
This bill would also grant businesses a right to information about a rule and an opportunity to submit feedback to the agency before a rule is even proposed, but the bill would not require this information be shared with the public at the same time. The bill would also require agencies to perform retrospective analyses at the request of any chairman or ranking minority member of any standing or select committee of the House or Senate. Such requests could potentially require agencies to perform a long list of retrospective reviews, diverting agency staff and resources from working on more critical national priorities and politicizing the rulemaking process.
In addition, by expanding the scope of judicial review, the legislation marks an unprecedented and dangerous move away from traditional judicial deference to agency experts toward a system in which courts overturn highly technical, resource-intensive agency decisions without the expertise needed to make such decisions. For example, placing judges who have little to no economics or scientific expertise in the role of second-guessing agency cost-benefit and scientific analyses does nothing to improve such analyses. Instead, this new and inappropriate role for the courts is a recipe for increased litigation, endless delays, and more uncertainty for regulated parties and the public.
This legislation would also fundamentally undermine the independence of independent agencies by subjecting them to the regulatory review office at the Office of Management and Budget. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) would be able to hold up any independent agency rule until OIRA is satisfied that the agency has complied with the numerous new analytical and cost-benefit requirements under H.R. 50. Thus, the bill would render these agencies independent in name only.
The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards firmly believes (and the public agrees) that we need stronger enforcement of existing regulations and an effective system of public protections that holds corporations and industry accountable for reckless and negligent behavior.
The costs of deregulation should be obvious by now: the Wall Street economic collapse, various food and product safety recalls, and numerous disasters including the recent the Dan River coal ash spill in North Carolina and the Freedom Industries chemical spill in West Virginia demonstrate the need for a regulatory system that protects the public, not corporate interests. Congress should be moving forward to protect the public from harm, not rolling back the clock and weakening important safeguards.
Again, the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards urges you to vote against the amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015.
Sincerely,
Katherine McFate, President and CEO
Center for Effective Government
Co-chair, Coalition for Sensible Safeguards
Robert Weissman, President,
Public Citizen
Co-chair, Coalition for Sensible Safeguards
CSS Opposes the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2015
January 26, 2015 / Congress
The Honorable Bob Goodlatte
Chairman
House of Representatives
Judiciary Committee
Washington, DC 20515The Honorable John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking member
House of Representatives
Judiciary Committee
Washington, DC 20515Markup of the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act
Dear Representative Goodlatte and Representative Conyers,
The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards strongly urges you to oppose the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2015 (SBRFIA). We are an alliance of consumer, small business, labor, scientific, research, good government, faith, community, health, environmental, and public interest groups, as well as concerned individuals, joined in the belief that our country’s system of regulatory safeguards provides a stable framework that secures our quality of life and paves the way for a sound economy that benefits us all.
The SBRFIA expands the reach and scope of the Regulatory Flexibility Act and would increase unnecessary and lengthy regulatory delays, increase undue influence by regulated industries and encourage convoluted court challenges.
The SBRFIA adds a host of new analytical requirements for agency policy actions – including rulemakings and guidance documents – that might affect a large number of small businesses, even if that effect is “indirect.” Because the bill defines “indirect effects” broadly, it would mandate wasteful new analyses that could be applied to virtually any action an agency attempts to undertake, no matter how tenuous the connection to small business interests. When added to the existing gauntlet of procedural and analytical requirements that agencies must already navigate in order implement laws, SBRFIA’s new requirements would serve only to further “ossify” rulemaking and make it nearly impossible for agencies to fulfill their congressionally mandated mission of protecting the public and responding to emerging health and environmental dangers.
The Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act also ties the hands of agencies by forcing them to delay actions until new analyses are completed. Under current law, an agency can continue to promulgate a regulation before it has finished the regulatory flexibility analysis, if the agency head believes its mission or the law calls for more immediate action. The SBRFIA would eliminate these commonsense procedures. Imagine if emergency regulations to protect miners had to be delayed until the agency could finish this onerous and highly speculative analysis – lives could be lost and people could be needlessly injured.
We recognize the need to reform the small business size standards, but feel that as written, this bill will give corporate interests an even greater advantage in the regulatory process than they already enjoy. It would hand to the Chief Counsel of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Advocacy new, broad authority to determine which entities count as “small businesses” for the purposes of implementing the Regulatory Flexibility Act. Already, the SBA can cover up to 99 percent of all employers. Some oil refineries, for instance, are counted as small businesses. These standards need to cover truly small businesses only – in particular, those that are too small to meaningfully participate in the rulemaking process without the help of the Office of Advocacy.
An investigation by the Center for Effective Government into the Small Business Advocacy Review Process revealed that Office of Advocacy often represents the interests of large corporations and their trade associations, not small business. The report found that the process has produced recommendations not limited to small business concerns, is duplicative and wasteful of agency resources, and in some cases has resulted in weakened health and safety standards.
Congress should increase oversight of the SBA’s Office of Advocacy and limit its activities and authority. Current law requires only a few select agencies to submit certain draft rules to small business review panels, but the SBRFIA would expand these mandates to all agencies, enlarging the number of regulations that would require such panels. Instead of constraining the Office of Advocacy, the SBRFIA gives it the power to write regulations governing all agencies’ compliance with the Regulatory Flexibility Act and to provide undue authority to comment in court cases, not just on agency analysis of impacts on small entities but also a wider range of agency performance topics far beyond the Office of Advocacy’s expertise.
Blocking, weakening, or delaying critical standards and safeguards will result in more foodborne illnesses, more air and water pollution, more injuries on the job that would increase costs to businesses and decrease our nation’s productivity, and a greater risk of financial fraud and collapse, both for individuals and the nation as a whole.
Americans deserve untainted food, safe drugs, clean air and water, workplace protections and a stable economy. Government has advanced these goals for decades. Updating these safeguards to protect the public would become even more difficult if the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act was enacted. We urge you to oppose this bill.
Sincerely,
Katherine McFate
President and CEO
Center for Effective Government
Co-chair, Coalition for Sensible Safeguards
Robert Weissman
President
Public Citizen
Co-chair, Coalition for Sensible Safeguards
The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards is an alliance of consumer, labor, scientific, research, good government, faith, community, health, environmental, and public interest groups, as well as concerned individuals, joined in the belief that our country’s system of regulatory safeguards provides a stable framework that secures our quality of life and paves the way for a sound economy that benefits us all.