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Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2015

Floor Speech

By: Ted Poe
By: Ted Poe
Date: Jan. 7, 2016
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Business and Consumers Government Operations

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Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, right now there is probably a group of folks down the street at a large oak table in a marble palace, nibbling on their $16 Federal muffins, drinking their lattes, typing on their new iPads regulations. They are the regulators. The very term brings fear and trepidation into the hearts of people who work for a living.

Meanwhile, 14 million Americans are sitting at their old kitchen table, drinking coffee from their Mr. Coffee pot with no job on the horizon.

Small-business owners constantly say that complying with government regulations is the biggest economic problem they face, even more so than the Federal income tax. Bear in mind that we have the highest corporate income tax in the world.

Some businesses pack up their bags and even move to places like China. Meanwhile, the U.S. regulators are putting businesses out of business.

Now, Congress created the regulators, so Congress needs to fix the problem with the regulators. H.R. 712, the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2015, takes a number of commonsense approaches and puts a check on the regulators.

Mr. Chairman, there are 175,000 pages of regulations. Do you really think we need that many regulations?

One of the most important provisions of this bill is it will require the executive branch to make semiannual and annual disclosures about planned regulations.

A lot of times, the regulators don't have any idea of the economic costs of their decisions and what they will have on the American economy. Many of them have never worked in private industry. They have never been to the States that they are trying to regulate. This bill will force the regulators to determine the cost of their actions before they take action.

These disclosures will help American job creators so they can plan for the impacts of the new regulations on their budgets, hiring, and operations.

I urge support of this logical piece of legislation. Congress needs to rein in and regulate the regulators.

And that is just the way it is.

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