[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 111 (Tuesday, July 11, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9650-S9652]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         FEDERAL OVERREGULATION

  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to commend the 
senior Senator from South Carolina and also the dean of the Senate for 
the statement that he made.
  Senator Thurmond has been in this Senate a long time. He has seen the 
evolution of the regulations that have come as a result of the laws 
that are passed by Congress.
  I think the Senator from South Carolina is saying that the regulators 
have gone far beyond congressional intent. He believes, as I do, that 
we must bring back the regulators, tell them what our congressional 
intent is, and try to bring some balance into the system.
  I thank the senior Senator from South Carolina for his leadership in 
this area and appreciate very much that, with his long experience, he 
would weigh in on behalf of this bill. In fact, it is a very important 
bill.
  One issue about which all Members have heard from our constituents 
over and over again is the need for fundamental reform of the tortured 
and increasingly tangled web of Federal overregulation.
  Congress passes laws. We delegate their implementation to regulators. 
If the regulators do not do what is envisioned by Congress, it is our 
responsibility to step in.
  In recent months, I have spoken on the floor of the Senate offering 
examples of Federal Government overregulation and unintended 
consequences of regulatory excess that puts Americans out of work. It 
usurps our constitutional rights. It saps our productivity. It saps our 
economic competitiveness.
  Americans have a right to expect their Government to work for them, 
not against them. Instead, Americans have to fight their Government in 
order to drive their cars, graze cattle on their ranches, or operate 
their small businesses in a reasonable, commonsense manner.
  I hear this every time I go home, or when I go to other States. The 
people of this country are tired of the harassment of their Government, 
and I think that was the message they sent in November 1994.
  The legislation before the Senate today provides lawmakers with a 
tool for ensuring that Federal agencies are carrying out Congress' 
regulatory intent properly and within the confines of Congress and no 
farther. Agencies have gotten into the habit of issuing regulations 
which go far beyond the intended purpose of the authorizing 
legislation. This bill is simply an extension of the system of checks 
and balances which has served our country so well for more than two 
centuries.
  Senator Thurmond has not been here for all two centuries, but we all 
know that it has gotten out of whack since Senator Thurmond has been in 
this Senate, and most certainly in the last 10 years, or 5 years, we 
have seen the balance go in the wrong direction. It is time to put the 
balance back in our Government and the ability of our Government to 
regulate our people.
  In November, the voters sent a message: We are tired of the arrogance 
of Washington, DC. Nothing demonstrates that arrogance more than the 
volumes of one-size-fits-all regulations which pour out of this city 
and impact on the daily life of the American people.
  The regulators in Washington, it seems, believe that everyone can fit 
into one cookie-cutter mold. They do not take into account the 
different situations in each business, in each State, in each city, and 
the things that might be affecting safety or whatever the regulation is 
covering in that city.
  I believe the voters went to the polls because they felt harassed by 
their Government, the Government that issues regulations without any 
thought of the impact on the small businesses of this country.
  You just do not feel the pinch of being a small business person 
unless you have been there, unless you have lived with the regulations 
and the mandates and the taxes that our small business people live with 
every day.
  Our small business people, Mr. President, are the economic engine of 
this country. Government is not the economic engine of America. Small 
business is. They create 80 percent of the new jobs in this country. 
Sometimes they feel like their Government is trying to keep them from 
growing and prospering and creating new jobs.
  If they do not grow and prosper and create new jobs, how are we going 
to absorb the new people coming into our economic system, the young 
people graduating from college, the immigrants who are coming into our 
country? How are we going to absorb them if we continue to force our 
small businesses to put money into regulatory compliance and redtape 
and filling out forms, instead of into the business to buy new machines 
that create new jobs. That is the issue we are talking about today.
  When I meet with small business people, men and women across our 
country, complaints about excessive Federal regulations are always at 
the top of their list.
 In fact, a few weeks ago the White House hosted a conference on small 
business and, according to those with whom I spoke who went to the 
conference, no one issue and no one agency energized the participants 
more than the need for comprehensive regulatory reform.

  They talk about taxes, yes. But, mostly, those small business people 
say, ``If you will get the regulations off our backs so we can compete, 
that's when we will be able to throw the shackles off and grow and 
prosper and create the new jobs for our country.''
  So, Mr. President, I am proud to be a cosponsor of the Comprehensive 
Regulatory Reform Act of 1995. This bill is necessary to get the 
regulatory process under control. The Republican majority of this 
Congress recognizes that the problems that business owners face are 
hurting our country and we are committed to doing something about it. 
We are committed to regulatory reform legislation that will establish a 
flexible 

[[Page S 9651]]
decisionmaking framework for Federal agents, so they know what the 
parameters are. We need to make our congressional intent very clear.
  Some of the regulators might have gotten out of control unwittingly. 
Maybe we were not clear enough. Congress has passed broad, general 
sorts of guidelines in the past. Maybe it is time we pass laws that are 
specific, so the regulators have no doubts. I think that is our 
responsibility, and this bill will take a step in that direction.
  We need to increase public participation in the regulatory 
decisionmaking process. That is what this bill will do. It will bring 
in peer groups to talk about the effects of the regulations so the 
regulators will know if there is a scientific basis for this 
regulation, if we really need it, how does it affect the workplace, the 
marketplace, worker safety, worker harassment--that is what this bill 
will speak to.
  It will require political and judicial accountability. If you do not 
have judicial accountability, there will not be any teeth in this law. 
So we will have the ability to have judicial review, to see if the 
regulation meets the test of the law that is passed.
  This bill will require the regulators to ask and answer the 
questions, ``Is the regulation worth the cost?'' And, ``Does this 
approach maximize the benefits to society as a whole?'' That is what 
the basic concept of this bill is.
  We have heard a lot about food safety. That is something the press 
has really talked about in the last couple of days. They have shown 
meatpacking plants and talked about the E. coli virus and the things 
that might happen if we have regulatory reform that will require the 
things we are talking about.
  The fact is, food safety is exempt from this bill. It is not spoken 
to. It is exempt because no one wants to worry about the safety of our 
food. So it is very important, as we look at the press that is going to 
be coming out of this bill, that we realize there are some very 
important exceptions because we want to make sure we do not do 
something that is going to hurt the health or welfare of the people of 
this country.
  No, the Regulatory Reform Act of 1995 is trying to put balance and 
common sense back into the system. We have survived in this country for 
2 centuries with a balanced approach. It is only in the last 5 or 10 
years that we have gone so far in the direction of excesses that we 
must now say to our business people, ``We are going to try to put some 
common sense into this equation. We are going to put people ahead of 
blind salamanders.'' That is the purpose of this act.
  The key principle embodied in this bill is cost-benefit analysis. Is 
it worth it? The premise is simple. Before an agency promulgates a 
regulation, it systematically measures the benefits of the regulation 
and compares those benefits to the costs. This analysis allows a full 
and complete understanding of the regulatory burden imposed on 
consumers by the Federal Government. Is the price increase, 
necessitated by the regulation, to people who are in the grocery store, 
worth the benefit to be gained? And, further, will the benefit actually 
be gained? That is a question that is not asked. Will the regulation 
actually achieve the purpose that it is supposed to achieve? That is a 
very important, basic concept, and that is what a cost-benefit analysis 
does.
  I want to talk more about cost-benefit analysis because there have 
been some studies done that show that we can spend $900 million to 
possibly save one life when we could take the same $900 million and 
assure that we would save hundreds of lives in other ways. So it 
becomes a matter of how we spend our resources. How will it benefit the 
most people? And that is what bringing common sense into the system 
will do.
  Risk assessment is an important complement to cost-benefit analysis. 
The problem with the current regulatory process is that it often 
focuses on minor risks while ignoring far greater threats to public 
health and safety. There are many risks to public health and, without 
effective risk assessment, funds available to address these risks will 
be needlessly squandered on questionable programs that do little to 
really promote public health and safety and environmental protection.
  In my home State of Texas we had the incredible experience of having 
a new mandate put on the citizens of Dallas and Houston and El Paso and 
Beaumont--cities that were in nonattainment areas for air quality, 
cities that are trying desperately to do something about it. El Paso 
has tried in every way to clean its air. But, because there is smoke 
coming across the border from Juarez, they are not able to do anything. 
And it is not their fault.
  Nevertheless, they were put under a mandate to have a vehicles 
emissions test by a certain specific machine that would possibly, we 
are told, have cleaned the air maybe 0.5 percent--maybe, rather than 
with other types of machines that are much cheaper, that would not have 
required the hassle to every consumer in those cities, and which would 
have done much the same but at much less cost. And it was not even 
proven that was the only machine that would be able to detect these 
emissions. Yet we had the requirement that we had to go to certain 
centers with just that machine, and the cost was in the hundreds of 
millions of dollars to the consumers of Texas. We were faced with doing 
that because of dealing with the EPA and not being able to have the 
flexibility to do what we could in a cost-beneficial manner.
  We are all trying to clean up the air. Of course, we are. But how 
much is going to be the cost to possibly get a 0.5-percent benefit to 
the air quality? And we are not even sure that it was necessary just to 
have that one machine. We find that there are also infrared rays that 
will pick up at an entry ramp the emissions that do not meet the test. 
We have an experiment that is in the works right now that would give us 
the ability to buy some time and in a much more cost-efficient way with 
much less hassle for the consumers of the cities all across America 
that are in the noncontainment areas. We could have something just as 
effective for them at a much less cost. That is what risk assessment 
and cost-benefit analysis will do for our country and for the 
regulators.
  Judicial review. Without judicial review, there is no way to ensure 
that the Federal agencies will use the risk assessment and the cost-
benefit analysis to write the regulations. I mean, that is what we have 
to have. We have to have the leverage that is out there so that we will 
be able to go to the judges and say, ``Did we meet the standard that is 
required under the law?'' And Congress is being specific about 
congressional intent.
  Good science, open science. It is important that we have the 
scientific basis for these regulations because we do not know for sure 
in many instances that there really is good, sound science in the 
sunshine in the regulations that are put forth.
  This we assured in the bill with peer review. In most cases today, 
the scientific and technical assessment on which regulations are based 
are not subjected to independent external peer review. As a result, the 
scientific and technical underpinnings of agency actions that may have 
enormous consequences often are not adequately tested. Regulation 
reform is necessary to assure that there will be an independent 
external peer review. We can get many of the scientists that understand 
these issues to be on a peer review panel to make sure that we have the 
ability to say absolutely for certain this regulation will accomplish 
what it is intended to accomplish. So regulation reform will reduce the 
burden of unnecessary Federal regulation.
  Requiring cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, judicial review, 
and the threat of congressional action will go a long way toward 
ensuring common sense in the promulgation of Federal regulations.
  There will be the ability in this bill for Congress to have 60 days 
to review any regulation and turn it back. That is a very important 
point. It is very important that Congress will be able to come in and 
say to regulators that they have gone beyond what we intended. That is 
the ultimate responsibility of Congress, and it is one that we must 
take.
  So, Mr. President, we are beginning now to set the framework in this 
debate. There has been a lot of hot air in the last week about what 
might happen if we do not have this ability to come in and put checks 
on the system. A lot has been said about what will happen if 

[[Page S 9652]]
we put some checks and balances in the system.
  Mr. President, I think this is a great step for the small business 
people of this country, and I am proud that the sponsors of the bill 
have done such a terrific job on a bipartisan basis to help the small 
business people of our country compete.
  Mr. President, I will stop here because I know that at 9:45 they are 
going to propose another amendment. But I just want to thank the 
managers of the bill, the sponsors of the bill, and the leadership for 
taking this very important step to free our businesses to compete in 
the international marketplace and for our small businesses to be able 
to grow and prosper and create the jobs that are going to keep this 
economy vital for the new people and to keep the young people 
graduating from high school and college employed. That is the goal, Mr. 
President.
  I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
  

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