Searching for and Cutting Regulations That Are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. GOODLATTE. 1155.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
As we begin 2016, we face the same difficulty we have faced since the beginning of the Obama administration. Because the administration and the entrenched Washington regulatory bureaucracy insist on piling burden upon burden on the backs of workers, Main Street families, and small-business owners, America is still struggling to create enough new jobs and economic growth to produce the prosperity we need.
To turn this problem around, we must not only stem the tide of unnecessarily costly new regulations; we must also get rid of the deadwood in the accumulated, existing regulations that impose almost $2 trillion in annual costs on our economy.
How can America's job creators create enough new jobs while Washington regulations divert so many of their resources in other directions? The SCRUB Act addresses this problem head-on with new, innovative ways to clear away the clutter of outdated and unnecessarily burdensome regulations.
For years, there has been a bipartisan consensus that this is an important task that must be performed. But, as with so many things, the hard part has always been the details. Different approaches have been tried by different Presidential administrations, and some solutions have been offered by Congress. But, to date, no sufficiently meaningful results have been produced.
In many ways, this is because past approaches never fully aligned the incentives and tools of all the relevant actors--regulatory agencies, regulated entities, the President, the Congress, and others--to identify and cut the regulations that can and should be cut.
On their own, regulators have little incentive to shine a spotlight on their errors or on regulations that are no longer needed. Regulated entities, meanwhile, may fear retaliation by regulators if they suggest ways to trim the regulators' authority. And the sheer volume of the Code of Federal Regulations, which now contains roughly 175,000 pages of regulations, presents a daunting task for any Congress or President to address.
The SCRUB Act represents a real step forward in our attempts to eliminate obsolete and unnecessarily burdensome Federal regulations without compromising needed regulatory objectives. By establishing an expert commission with the resources and authority to assess independently where and how regulations are outdated and unnecessarily burdensome, it overcomes the disincentives for agencies and even regulated entities to identify problem regulations.
In addition, by providing a legislative method to immediately repeal the most problematic regulations, the SCRUB Act assures that we will take care of the biggest problems quickly. Further, by instituting regulatory CutGo measures for the remaining regulations the commission identifies for repeal--when Congress approves the repeal--the bill assures that the rest of the work of cutting regulations will finally happen.
I urge my colleagues to support the SCRUB Act.
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