Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. COHEN. I want to thank the ranking member for yielding time.
This bill amends the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, which requires agencies to engage in so much analysis and in so many new procedures that it basically befuddles the agencies in bringing forth any rules in the future. It is elimination by burdensome regulation. While it doesn't say it is eliminating rules, that's the effect of it. It subjects all major rules and other rules, those which have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities, to review by small business review panels.
The cumulative effect of these and other changes in H.R. 527 will be to undermine the ability of agencies to effectively regulate consumer health and product safety, environmental protection, workplace safety, and financial services industry misconduct, among other critical concerns.
We talk about small businesses. Small businesses are important, and they create more jobs than any other sector of our economy, but small businesses are made up of human beings. To paraphrase Mitt Romney, who said that corporations are people, small businesses are people, too. Small businesses are concerned about consumer health and product safety because they are the victims of it. Small businesses are concerned about environmental protection and workplace safety and food and drug safety and, certainly, about financial services industry misconduct, which almost brought this country to its knees in what could have been a depression but for the work of our great President and the Congress that worked with him at that time.
This bill does little to help small businesses shape or comply with Federal regulations. Right now, we can take for granted that the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the places we work, the planes we fly on, the cars we drive, and the bank accounts in which we put our savings are going to be safe because we have strong regulation; but if H.R. 527 is enacted, it will be harder, much more difficult, maybe impossible, to provide those protections for future generations.
H.R. 527 is based on the well-intentioned, but false, premise that regulations result in economically stifling costs.
In particular, proponents of H.R. 527, and of anti-regulatory legislation generally, of which we have seen an abundance in this Congress, repeatedly cite a thoroughly debunked study by economists Mark and Nicole Crain, which made the ridiculous claim that Federal regulations impose a $1.57 trillion cost on the economy.
Ridiculous? Why, you say. Because they even admitted, and the Congressional Research Service said, it failed to account for any benefits of regulation. There are indeed benefits of regulation and great--and the Office of Management and Budget said great benefits outweigh costs.
Moreover, the study was never intended to be a decisionmaking tool for lawmakers or Federal regulatory agencies to use in choosing the right level of regulation. But they still use that as the basis for this law.
So let's focus on the real facts.
H.R. 527 will bring agency rulemaking to a halt because of multiple layers of bureaucratic review and analysis that it adds to the rulemaking process. It is the de facto end of regulations.
As Sherwood Boehlert, a colleague of mine here in Congress, of the previous Congresses from the State of New York and a Republican and a long time chair of the House Science Committee, recently warned, this measure ignores history--Newt Gingrich--``ignores history, larding the system with additional reviews based on previous efforts that have slowed progress while helping nobody.''
Second, the bill clearly presents a serious threat to public health and safety for all Americans. It does this by eliminating the emergency authority that currently allows agencies to waive or delay certain analyses so they can expeditiously respond to national crises such as a massive oil spill, or a nationwide outbreak of food poisoning, or an emerging financial marketplace meltdown. We've experienced all of these.
The priority in the face of an emergency is to have emergency agencies to say, sorry, we can't do this. We have to conduct regulatory analysis first before we aid the American people.
H.R. 527 is simply chock full of crafty provisions to slow down rulemaking, requiring small business advocacy review panels to analyze rules promulgated by all agencies, and not just those from the three agencies for which review panels are currently required. Moreover, it would require review panels for all major rules, not just those that have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities. And this bill would force agencies to engage in seemingly endless, wasteful and speculative analysis, including assessment of all reasonably foreseeable, indirect--indirect--economic effects of a proposed rule.
I think we may see agencies purchasing crystal balls so they can comply with this inane requirement of looking into the future. As any first-year law student would know, it can take years of costly and time-consuming litigation to figure out exactly what is reasonably foreseeable and what is indirect. Where is Mr. Paul's graph?
While adding analytical requirements and opportunities for industry to disrupt rulemaking, H.R. 527 provides absolutely no assistance to business in complying with Federal regulations, which is what small business really needs. And for those of us who should really be worried about the national deficit, this bill has a hefty price tag. The most conservative estimates, $80 million, and a more realistic estimate is $291 million over a 5-year period.
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Mr. COHEN. Thank you.
H.R. 527, like H.R. 3010, which we will also consider this week, is simply a wolf in sheep's clothing. What proponents seem to describe as commonsense revisions to current law actually would result in a dramatic overhaul of the rulemaking process, threatening agencies' ability to ensure basic health, safety, and other precautions.
I oppose this bill and urge my colleagues to do so. Also the cumulative effect of these and other bills would be to be undermine the ability of agencies to effectively regulate consumer health, work product safety, environment protection, financial services misconduct, and others. Right now we can take these for granted.
This is a dangerous bill, and I would ask our Members to vote against it and think about the safety of the public and the future. Small businesses are people, as Mr. Romney said about corporations, and those people also suffer from lack of regulation.
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Mr. COHEN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
My amendment would exempt from this particular bill the rules it has when it relates to food safety, workplace safety, consumer product safety, air quality, and water quality--things we all hold dear, things that will be jeopardized if this bill passes.
As I noted in my opening remarks, this threatens to halt agencies' ability to promulgate rules by adding analytical requirements and numerous opportunities for industry to challenge agency rulemaking. Yet you should be able to challenge agency rulemaking, but courts shouldn't be able to summarily throw them out based on a lack of knowledge that they have of an area in which the agencies are really expert, but that's what would happen.
The societal cost of enacting H.R. 527 would be to place public health and safety at risk. As we enter this holiday season, it would be well to remember that the reason we take for granted that the food we eat and the water we drink--and the drinks we drink--at all our holiday dinners and receptions won't kill us or sicken us is because of effective rulemaking. Likewise, because of strong regulations, we can take for granted that toys given to our children or grandchildren won't poison them; but the consequences of failing to regulate can be dire.
In 2006 24-year-old Jillian Castro became gravely ill after eating spinach tainted with E. coli bacteria. Her organs were rapidly deteriorating; her kidneys were failing; her red blood cells and platelets were dropping rapidly; and she nearly died.
According to the best available estimates by public health and food safety experts, millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths each year in this country can be traced to contaminated food.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that foodborne microorganisms have caused 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths. Many of these could be avoided with the proper regulations of food and drug. That's why I ask that food safety be eliminated from this
bill, because it will be expensive to treat these people, let alone the fact that they will die. The CDC estimates that salmonella alone affects a million people a year. Just today, the Food and Drug Administration issued a recall of grape tomatoes because of potential salmonella contamination.
Other recent examples of regulatory failure include the Listeria-tainted cantaloupes that killed 29 people across the country in October. Pedal entrapment issues that cause cars to accelerate unexpectedly resulted in Toyota's recall of nearly 2 million vehicles. There was Mattel's recall of nearly a million toys in 2007 because the toys were covered in lead paint. There are other examples of this.
Public health and safety precautions have been on the books for a long time and were passed with bipartisan support. The fact is there were more regulations during President Bush's term than there were overall in President Obama's when you calculate the time they've been in office. Yet there was no call to cut back when President Bush was in office. It's only since President Obama has been in office.
The Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt, then the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act in 1938. The Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act were enacted in 1970 when Richard Nixon was President. The Clean Water Act was enacted in 1977. They've served our country well for many years.
If H.R. 527 is enacted without adopting this amendment, we can no longer take protections from these harms for granted because, in the future, agencies will be hamstrung from passing regulations to protect the public.
I would urge us to pass this amendment and to protect our workers, our consumers, our small businesses, and our small business people when they eat their breakfasts, their lunches and their dinners, when they buy toys for their children and their grandchildren, when they drive their cars, and when they work in their workplaces.
I yield back the balance of my time and ask for a positive vote.
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