[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 108 (Thursday, June 29, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9348-S9349]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         REGULATORY REFORM BILL

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, it is no accident that the United States 
today has the cleanest air and water we have had in decades, perhaps 
the cleanest in the world. We have the safest and most affordable food 
and the safest, most advanced, and most effective drugs. American 
workplaces are safer than they have ever been before. Our national 
productivity is the envy of the world. In short, our regulatory system 
is achieving the goals we have set. There is no justification to scrap 
it or trash it.
  We can improve the current system, especially to streamline it, and 
reduce redtape, bureaucracy and delays. But I will not support a bill 
that carves gaping loopholes in the current system.
  We all know what is going on here. The extremist Republican majority 
in Congress has given the keys of the store to profit-sharing business 
lobbyists and an unholly collection of special interest groups.
  We know that many well-heeled enterprises have no use for Government 
regulations that cramp their profits or protect the public interest. 
There is no love lost for regulations that make them clean up pollution 
they cause, or that prohibit them from marketing dangerous or unhealthy 
products, or that make them spend part of their profits to protect the 
health and safety of their workers.
  Are the costs of this kind of regulation way out of line? Have we 
spent too much safeguarding health and safety and protecting the 
environment? On the whole, we have not. We heard estimates yesterday 
about the cost of regulations. But we heard nothing about the benefits 
of those regulations.
  It is no surprise or wonder that those who care about the environment 
and public health and public interest are deeply concerned about this 
bill. We can only hope that the cost-benefit analyses mandated by the 
bill will be more balanced than our debate about the costs and benefits 
of regulation. If the Congress does not protect the public interest, 
who will?
  In fact, there is good evidence that the estimates cited yesterday 
are greatly exaggerated. In the first place, about half of the entire 
regulatory burden comes from a single agency--the Internal Revenue 
Service--which is not even covered by the bill.
  The Environmental Protection Agency, and environmental regulations 
generally, are said to be the next biggest culprit. But the Bureau of 
Labor Statistics has been surveying businesses about the causes of 
their layoffs for years, and the businesses themselves attribute only 
one-tenth of one percent of their layoffs to the burdens of 
environmental laws and regulations. If environmental regulations caused 
the kind of impacts that the supporters of this bill claim, we would 
expect the businesses themselves to be aware of them.
  We have all heard stories of regulatory excesses, and a small number 
of them are true. There have been regulators who have overreached and 
made unjustifiable decisions, such as the inspector who cited a company 
for a violation when employees violated OSHA standards to rescue the 
victim of a trench cave-in.
  But honest, accurate examples of regulatory excess are relatively 
rare, considering the size and complexity of the economy. We hear the 
same handful of anecdotal examples over and over again. But we hear 
less about the benefits of our regulatory system, which are taken for 
granted and are undeniable. We have never had a Chernobyl or a Bhopal 
or a thalidomide tragedy in the United States. We should be proud of 
that record--and cautious about making changes that could make 
tragedies more likely.
  The reckless practices that led to dangerous workplaces, to American 
rivers catching fire, and to the near-extinction of the bald eagle have 
given way over the past quarter century to rules which help ensure that 
today's children can look forward to safe and healthy places to work 
and a clean environment that reflects the best of our heritage. We need 
to keep these priorities in mind and in perspective as we consider this 
bill.
  We also need to remember that we are not writing on a clean slate. 
Congress and the President have recently made important changes to 
improve the regulatory process, and other sensible changes are on the 
way. In March, President Clinton signed the Unfunded Mandates Act, 
which requires all rules that have an impact on the economy of $100 
million or more to have a cost-benefit analysis and a risk assessment. 
The President's executive order on regulation, signed last year, has 
similar requirements.
  The Senate has passed the Nickles-Reid bill, which requires every 
regulation to lay over for 45 days before becoming effective, in order 
to allow Congress to block regulations that do not make sense or which 
impose excessive costs. We need that kind of oversight of the 
regulatory process, and it is being put in place and should be given a 
chance to work.
  Unfortunately, much of the pending bill is overkill. The Dole-
Johnston draft is an improvement over the Judiciary Committee bill. But 
without additional, significant changes, it could severely undermine 
the health of large numbers of American families, leave major areas of 
the environment ravaged by pollution, and threaten the health and 
safety on the job of millions of American workers. In too many ways, 
the Dole-Johnston is still, like the bill reported from the Judiciary 
Committee, a blueprint to paralyze the regulatory process.
  Rulemakings under the Occupational Safety and Health Act would have 
more than 20 new steps, making an already slow process much slower. 
OSHA's 5-year-long rulemaking on cadmium, which causes cancer and 
kidney disease, would have become a 10-year ordeal.
  The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a rule requiring label 
warning statements and single-dose packaging on certain dietary iron 
supplements, which cause about 10,000 poisonings of children a year. 
Iron tablet overdoses can cause intestinal bleeding, shock, coma, 
seizures, and death in children. Because of the bill's retroactive 
effective date, FDA will have to redo its risk assessment and cost-
benefit analysis to meet the rigid, one-size-fits-all requirements of 
the bill. This will create unnecessary costs, and delay a rule that 
will save children's lives and prevent $250 million a 

[[Page S 9349]]

year in medical, litigation, and other costs.
  The State of Illinois had a very negative experience with this kind 
of one-size-fits-all regulatory reform. The Illinois law's mandated 
cost-benefit analyses did nothing to improve the quality of regulation. 
But according to a story in the Chicago Tribune, the requirement added 
as much as 42 months of delay to every rule. In 1992, after 14 years of 
experience, Illinois repealed the law.
  The Wall Street Journal, which supports regulatory reform, admitted 
in one of its editorials that the bill is designed to ensnare the 
bureaucrats in redtape. But creating redtape is not the answer to any 
regulatory problems the American people want solved. It will not in any 
way expedite the approval of needed drugs and medical devices. It will 
not focus regulation on the worst problems, and it will not allow 
agencies to rely on common sense. In fact, it will do just the 
opposite.
  By creating multiple, overlapping, and uncontrollable petition 
procedures to review all existing regulations, the Dole-Johnston bill 
will tie up so many resources that agencies will be forced to abandon 
their examination of new issues, new problems and new solutions. That 
is the clear and obvious purpose of the petition process, and it is 
unacceptable.
  Without substantial additional budgets and personnel, agencies like 
the FDA will be forced to shift resources, and will not have enough 
people to work on approving new products. The Federal work force has 
been cut by 75,000 workers, and another 125,000 will be cut in the near 
future. Yet the Dole-Johnston bill piles on new procedural requirements 
that will cost the agencies hundreds of millions of dollars a year and 
require more staff, not less.
  Compounding the problem, the Dole-Johnston bill literally gives every 
regulated business the right to compel every agency to examine each 
separate regulation and decide whether each individual business should 
be exempted from it. This is a radical, extremist proposal that 
fundamentally undermines the rule of law. A more honest approach would 
be to simply repeal the workplace safety, environmental, and public 
health laws. The Dole-Johnston bill repeals them indirectly through a 
kind of stealth process.
  A sausage maker, for example, who decided he no longer wanted to 
comply with food safety laws and worker safety laws could petition the 
FDA and OSHA for exemptions from every applicable regulation. The 
agencies would be compelled to respond in writing to each factual and 
legal claim within 180 days, although the bill provides no standard for 
the decisions they would have to make.
  The agencies would be totally overwhelmed if just one-tenth of one 
percent of the 6 million regulated businesses petitioned for exemption 
from a single regulation, let alone from multiple regulations. Because 
a denial of the petition would be immediately reviewable by the courts, 
the agencies would be forced into an explosion of litigation--or else 
grant the petitions.
  In these and other ways, the bill is a veritable gold mine for 
lawyers and lobbyists. On issues ranging from securities law, to 
product liability, to medical malpractice, the effort in Congress has 
been to reduce litigation in our society, not encourage it. But now, 
when big business is the plaintiff, the authors of this bill want to 
widen the courthouse door.
  This bill has many other problems. It would make it extremely 
difficult to protect crops from imported pests, since extensive, peer-
reviewed risk analyses would have to be performed before quarantine 
orders could be issued.
  Environmental regulations such as those put in place under the Clean 
Air Act of 1990, which are removing more than a billion pounds of toxic 
emissions from the air each year, would be subject to reopening by any 
regulated business. EPA could be forced to redo its cost-benefit 
analysis of these enormously successful regulations in order to examine 
such foolish alterations as making the standards voluntary.
  Regulations on veterans benefits suffering from gulf war syndrome 
would be delayed until cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments could 
be completed. Drug-testing regulations for truck drivers and 
congressionally-mandated standards for mammograms would be delayed. FAA 
air-worthiness and air safety rules would be subjected to cost-benefit 
tests and the additional paperwork of risk assessments and peer 
reviews.
  Finally, the bill contains a provision that as a practical matter 
repeals the Delaney clause, the provision in the Food, Drug and 
Cosmetic Act that protects the American people from cancer-causing 
pesticides and additives in food. I agree that the 37 year-old Delaney 
clause should be modernized in light of modern scientific knowledge 
about the risks of chemicals. But the sweeping and extremist approach 
in this bill poses a grave threat to all Americans, especially children 
whose diet and metabolism render them especially vulnerable to cancer-
causing chemicals in their food.
  Our water and air are not too clean. Our workplaces are not too 
healthy. Our air traffic and highway systems are not too safe. Our 
children are not too protected from dangerous products. This bill will 
delay further progress and undo much of the progress we have made. 
Without major changes, I cannot support it.


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