Congressional leadership on regulatory streamlining is more urgent than ever in the wake of a post-Covid legislative flurry and attendant regulatory pressures soon to be felt alongside already grave budgetary ones. A new proposal led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) called the “Unnecessary Agency Regulations Reduction Act” fits the bill.
Law, Rules, Standards, Agreement, Contract
The bill would take the sensible steps of “reduc[ing] burdensome government regulations and more efficiently dispos[ing] of outdated, duplicative or unnecessary agency regulations.”
This UARRA legislation would require that OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs critically assess regulations both planned and effective (a task it has abandoned of late). Among much else that assessment would take into account the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) evaluations of unnecessary duplication across the federal government.
OMB would then compile an annual report to Congress on outdated, duplicative, or unnecessary major rules that could be eliminated, thereby giving Congress the raw material it needs to eliminate multiple agency regulations simultaneously via joint resolution.
As a hidden tax whose costs rival the unambiguous toll we deal with every April 15, the burdens of federal regulation require far greater disclosure and fresh legislative mechanisms to stem the unrelieved flow of thousands annually in the Federal Register.
The “Criteria for Review” section of the “Unnecessary Agency Regulations Reduction Act” is particularly important. The various benchmarks for identifying unnecessary regulations include determining whether they have achieved their original purpose, economic impacts, potential harms to competition and innovation, effects on wage growth, outdatedness and more.
Properly adhering to these criteria would underscore the prior neglect of streamlining, since political and regulatory failures can easily outweigh the market failures that allegedly justify regulation. This refocus is particularly pertinent with respect to clearing the path for new areas of the economy (like artificial intelligence) where Washington’s agencies ought not butt in without congressional authorization as they seem inclined to do.
The Unnecessary Agency Regulations Reduction Act must be rigorously enforced by Congress to ensure that streamlining actually occurs, however. The bill would put the Administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs explicitly in charge of considering and acting upon “Criteria for Review”; but that Office and Biden himself are now resistant to regulatory pruning.
Without the clarification of OMB’s supervisory duty that UARRA can bring, OMB leadership will continue pursuing pro-regulatory transformations that diminish the historical “watchdog” mission. OMB has become a regulatory advocate, evidenced in a problematic rewrite of “Circular A-4” guidance on regulatory review procedures, acquiescence to the elimination of the “economically significant” rule category, elimination of the “Deregulatory” classification for rules, and a recent transformation of the Information Collection Budget. Once aimed at reducing red tape, the ICB is no longer a celebration of and tool for streamlining, but a vehicle in pursuit of larger government via increased access to taxpayer-provided benefits via the likes of automatic eligibilities and partnerships with community-based organizations.
The UARRA could put the brakes on such transformations at OMB. It could also inspire the resurrection of the Report to Congress on Regulatory Costs and Benefits, which arguably would itself be instrumental to the compilation of the annual UARRA streamlining report to Congress.
The bottom line, the Unnecessary Agency Regulations Act itemizes key elements of what must be done to amplify regulatory disclosure and prevent the placement of unwarranted burdens on the pubic. Unlike OMB’s tendency under Biden, the task is to reduce regulation, not look for ways to add to the torrent of rules already flying by.
Expansive legislative efforts in COVID’s wake are already spawning new regulation and sub-regulatory guidance documents, a trickle likely to become a flood. The need the Unnecessary Agency Regulations Act will become even more apparent amid these new realities.
Congress is often called upon to reassert its primary legislative role and end its practice of over-delegation. The purging of unnecessary rules and regulations is an essential part of that overall mission.