[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 111 (Tuesday, July 11, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9709-S9712]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  COMPREHENSIVE REGULATORY REFORM ACT

  Mr. THOMPSON.
   Mr. President, I rise tonight in support of 

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S. 343, the Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act of 1995. This bill is 
an essential part of our effort to make the Federal Government run more 
efficiently and effectively, and curtail its ability to impose 
unnecessary burdens on the American people.
  We have already enacted laws that will reduce unfunded mandates and 
the burdens of paperwork on State and local governments, as well as the 
average citizen. We are moving decisionmaking back to the States in 
many important areas, because the States are closer to the people and 
to the problems that need to be solved. We are making real progress 
toward eliminating Federal departments and agencies that no longer 
serve a useful purpose. Most importantly, we are well on our way to 
requiring that the Federal Government live within its means in the form 
of a balanced budget.
  This bill is the next logical step in this process of rethinking the 
role of the Federal Government in everyday life. This bill's message is 
very simple. It says: let Members make sure that the Federal Government 
adequately protects the health and safety of every American. But, also 
make sure that, when agencies develop regulations to provide that 
protection, those regulations are founded in good, common sense. Get 
out of the mindset that the Federal Government needs to regulate 
everything in this country. And, set priorities, so that the Federal 
Government addresses the most important problems citizens face.
  How does this bill accomplish these goals? Well, the bill requires 
agencies to make accurate determinations about the good a potential 
regulation can bring about. In other words, how much disease or 
premature death can be avoided? Or, how much less dangerous can a 
situation be made? In answering these questions, the Federal agency 
must be as precise as possible, using the most carefully prepared and 
up-to-date scientific information.
  Then, the agency needs to look at the negative impact that very same 
regulation may have on Americans. For example, how much more will the 
average American have to pay for a particular product? Will some 
Americans lose their jobs? Will some products no longer be available to 
American people at all? Will citizens have to spend a greater amount of 
their leisure time complying with Government mandates? Will preventing 
one disease cause an increase in some other equally dangerous disease?
  Once all of these important questions have been asked and answered, 
S. 343 requires the Federal agency to put all of this information 
together and ask the central question: Do the benefits
 of this rule outweigh the costs? Or, in more simple terms: Does this 
rule produce enough good things for our citizens to make the negative 
impacts tolerable?

  Mr. President, what I have just laid out is S. 343's approach to 
developing and issuing Federal rules. I think the American people would 
say that this approach is based in ordinary common sense. This is how 
they make decisions on countless questions that come up in their own 
lives every single day. Do I spend money for a newer, safer car, or 
keep my old one? Do I put money aside for retirement or do I spend it 
now? Americans make calculations about the costs and benefits of their 
behavior all the time.
  And now, Americans are asking that the Federal Government approach 
problems in this way too. They are asking regulators to make decisions 
as if they were sitting around the kitchen table. They understand that 
the Federal Government deals with complicated problems. What they don't 
understand is why the answers to these problems cannot be developed 
from the same process that they use at home.
  Mr. President, so far, I have described the method S. 343 lays out 
for determining the costs and benefits of Federal regulations. Some of 
our colleagues believe that S. 343 would be a pretty good bill if it 
just stopped right there. In my view, if we could trust the agencies to 
do the right thing, we could stop there. Unfortunately, recent history 
tells us that the agencies sometime need more encouragement to actually 
do what is right.
  Since the early 1970's, Presidents have asked Federal agencies to 
analyze the costs and benefits of a regulation before issuing it. On 
September 30, 1993, President Clinton continued that longstanding 
tradition by putting in place an Executive order. The philosophy and 
principles contained in S. 343 largely mirror those in the Executive 
order of President Clinton. That is where the similarity stops. As with 
all Executive orders, President Clinton's specifically precludes 
judicial review as a way of forcing agencies to consider costs and 
benefits before issuing rules.
  If Federal agencies were complying with the Executive order, we would 
not be here on the Senate floor tonight. The fact is that they are not. 
When the whim suits them, Federal agencies comply with the Executive 
order. When it does not, they do not. In most cases, agencies are not 
making careful assessments of the positive and negative impacts of 
their regulations.
  That is why, in my view, the judicial review provisions of S. 343 are 
so important--in fact, vital--to this legislation. We must provide 
judicial review if the legal protections we enact in this bill are to 
have any significance. Only the availability of judicial review will 
ensure that agencies will analyze the costs
 and benefits of major rules, as this bill requires.

  Mr. President, S. 343's judicial review provisions provide an 
essential tool for citizens to hold their Government--and in particular 
unelected regulators--accountable. But, the bill does not--as its 
opponents charge--create new causes of action that will clog the 
courts. This bill merely directs courts, reviewing otherwise reviewable 
agency action, to consider the compliance of the agency with the 
requirements of this legislation.
  Mr. President, I will have more to say on the important subject of 
judicial review as this debate goes forward.
  S. 343 contains two other provisions that will force Federal 
regulators to produce sensible regulations also. The first of these 
provisions, in my view is most important, that is chapter 8 of S. 343, 
which authorizes congressional review of regulations. My colleagues 
will recall that this language is virtually identical to the 
congressional review bill that the Senate passed earlier this year in 
the place of a 1-year moratorium on regulations.
  Section 801 gives the Congress 60 days to review a final rule before 
that rule actually becomes effective. During that time, Congress can 
determine whether the rule is consistent with the law Congress passed 
in the first place. Perhaps more importantly, Congress can look at the 
rule to see if it makes good sense. I think that this process will not 
only hold the regulators' feet to the fire, but it will also keep 
Congress from passing laws that do not work or are too costly.
  S. 343 also makes Federal agencies accountable by requiring them to 
review periodically the rules that they put on the books. Some rules 
that addressed important needs a long time ago are no longer necessary. 
Some may just need rethinking. In my view, this is a healthy process 
for agencies to be engaged in on a regular basis.
  Mr. President, if all of this common sense is still not enough to get 
some of my colleagues to support this legislation, perhaps a few 
statistics on the cost of Federal regulation will illustrate the need 
to reign them in. After all, Federal regulations operate as a hidden 
tax on every American.
  It has been estimated that the total cost of Federal regulations is 
about equal to the Federal tax burden on the American people--a cost of 
more than $10,000 per household. One estimate of the direct cost 
imposed by Federal regulations on the private sector and on State and 
local governments in 1992 was $564 billion; another estimate put the 
cost at $857 billion.
  When the total Federal regulatory burden is broken down into parts, 
we find several staggering statistics. Economic regulations--imposed 
largely on the communications, trucking, and banking industries--cost 
over $200 billion a year. Paperwork costs--the cost to merely collect, 
report, and maintain information for Federal regulators--add another 
$200 billion a year and consume over 64 billion person hours per year 
in the private sector. This figure does not include the massive number 
of hours Federal employees spend on processing and evaluation 
information.
  Environmental regulation is estimated to cost $122 billion, which 
represents approximately 2 percent of the 

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gross domestic product. And finally, in 1992, safety and other social 
regulations imposed costs ranging from $29 billion to $42 billion in 
1992.
  The numbers reflect the high costs of regulation to the private 
sector--and I should remind my colleagues that those costs must be 
borne by small businesses as well as the larger ones. As we all know, a 
good portion of those costs are passed through to all of us in the form 
of higher prices. But we also pay for the Government's costs to 
administer these regulations, and those costs are soaring too.
  Measured in constant 1987 dollars, Federal regulatory spending grew 
from $8.8 billion in 1980 to $11.3 billion by 1992. In addition, by 
1992, the Federal Government employed 124,994 employees to issue and 
enforce regulations--an all-time high.
  Higher prices and taxes are not the only result of government 
regulation. A recent study done for the U.S. Census Bureau found a 
strong correlation between regulation and reduced productivity. The 
study found that plants with a significant regulatory burden have 
substantially lower productivity rates than less regulated plants.
 And that is one of the factors that I think is missing in our balanced 
budget debate so often, Mr. President.

  We talk about spending. We talk about taxes, as we must and as is 
proper. But we do not talk enough about the need for growth and the 
need for productivity. Unless we have productivity in this country, 
unless we continue to grow in this country, we will never balance the 
budget. We will never balance the budget. And in order to have that 
growth in productivity we must have investment. In order to have 
investment we must have savings. In order to have savings we must get a 
handle on a ridiculous tax structure that we have in this country. We 
must get a handle on the national debt. And we must do something about 
this regulatory burden. It all goes in together and it all finds itself 
in the bottom line of productivity. So we are really talking about a 
budgetary matter here, in my estimation, as much as anything else.
  Given all of these statistics, you might assume that President 
Clinton would cut back on Federal regulations. This is what the 
American people have been asking for. And, indeed, it is what President 
Clinton promised in his National Performance Review. In that review, 
the President promised to ``end the proliferation of unnecessary and 
unproductive rules.''
  Instead of keeping that promise, President Clinton and his 
administration have gone in the opposite direction. For each of the 
first 2 years of the Clinton administration, the number of pages of 
actual regulations and notices published in the Federal Register 
exceeded any year since the Carter administration. Despite his 
rhetoric, President Clinton has increased, not decreased, the number of 
regulations.
  The statistics I have just reviewed make a sufficiently compelling 
case for regulatory reform. But there is still more evidence to support 
the case for S. 343. Some of my colleagues have already described many 
examples of the existing regulations that defy common sense. There are 
many more stories that could be told. I would only like to add a couple 
to the growing list.
  One example of regulation gone wild can be found in the Environmental 
Protection Agency's implementation of the Federal Superfund Program. As 
the Members of this body well know, the Superfund law requires the 
cleanup of some 1,200 toxic waste sites around the Nation. Under this 
program, the EPA and private parties have spent billions of dollars 
with very little to show in the way of results. Few sites have actually 
been cleaned up. Of the ones that have been cleaned up, many have been 
restored to a level of cleanliness that far exceeds any real health 
risks to humans.
  A March 21, 1993, article from the New York Times, describes the 
unrealistic level of cleanup EPA required at one site.

       EPA officials said they wanted to make the site safe enough 
     to be used for any purpose--including houses--though no one 
     was propose to build anything there. With that as the agency 
     goal, the agency wanted to make sure children could play in 
     the dirt, even eat it, without risk. And since a chemical in 
     the dirt had been shown to cause cancer in rats, the agency 
     set a limit low enough that a child could eat half a teaspoon 
     of dirt every month for 70 years and not get cancer. Last 
     month, the EPA officials acknowledged that at least half of 
     the $14 billion the nation has spent on Superfund clean-ups 
     was used to comply with similar ``dirt-eating rules,'' as 
     they call them.

  Mr. President, in conclusion, burdensome Federal regulations are also 
imposed on small businesses. Dry cleaners, in particular, must clear a 
large number of hurdles just to begin operating. According to the 
National Federation of Independent Businesses, as of 1991, the Federal 
Government required a new dry cleaner to fill out and comply with 
nearly 100 forms and manuals before it could open for business.
  Yesterday, the Senate approved two important amendments to address 
the special problems that all small businesses, including dry cleaners, 
face. As amended, S. 343 now requires regulatory agencies to review 
regulations imposed on small entities for cost effectiveness.
  Mr. President, I think the evidence is clear that our Federal 
regulatory system has become unreasonable and misguided.
 S. 343 will put it back on the right track and, therefore, I urge its 
passage by my colleagues.

  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The distinguished Senator from Texas.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I am very glad to follow the Senator 
from Tennessee. I think he made some very good points, and I think it 
is important that the people of America see some of the things that are 
happening in this country that we have to fix. The buck stops right 
here, and only we can do it because we have passed these laws, and the 
regulators have gone far beyond what Congress ever intended.
  I am the cochair of the Republican Task Force on Regulatory Reform. 
Because of that, I have heard from literally hundreds of employers, 
from Texas as well as small business people all over our country. I 
have heard dozens of absurd, even silly, examples of the impact of the 
Federal regulatory excess in our daily lives.
  Senator Hatch from Utah, who has been managing the bill, has started 
talking about the 10 most absurd regulations of the day. He is now up 
to 20, and I am sure he is going to have 10 more tomorrow, that will 
just make people wonder what in the world is in the water up in 
Washington, DC.
  It is going to be a good question, and I have a few myself that I 
want to share, to show the importance of passing this bill, to try to 
take the harassment off the small business people of our country.
  The many egregious stories about the enforcement of some of these 
regulations have become legendary, and the people are asking us to say, 
``time out.'' We are not the All Star baseball game tonight, but we 
know what time out is, at least for baseball, and this time out is to 
get the regulatory train back on the track.
  Common law has relied on a reasonable person approach. The standard 
behind our laws should be: What would a reasonable person do under 
these circumstances? But many of our Federal regulations seem to be 
designed to dictate the way in which a person, reasonable or otherwise, 
must act in every single situation. You know that is impossible. You 
cannot anticipate every single situation that might come up and write a 
regulation to cover that. What happens is you have too many regulations 
and people do not know what is really important. What are the 
regulators going to really enforce? And what is just trying to get to 
some bit of minutia? We have really taken the reasonableness out of the 
equation, and we have failed to allow for the application of good, old-
fashioned common sense. For that reason, this debate is dominated by 
examples of Government out of control.
  Let me give you a few. They may not rival Senator Hatch's, but these 
are stories that have been related to me. Take the case of a plumbing 
company in Dayton, TX, cited for not posting emergency phone numbers at 
a construction site. The construction site was three acres of empty 
field being developed for low-income housing. OSHA shuts the site down 
for 3 days until the company constructs a freestanding wall in order to 
meet the OSHA requirement to post emergency phone numbers on a wall.
  There is a roofing company in San Antonio, TX, cited for not 
providing 

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disposable drinking cups to their workers despite the fact that the 
company went to the additional expense of providing sports drinks free 
to their employees in glass containers which the employees in turn used 
for drinking water. In this case you have a company that went the extra 
mile, went beyond just paper cups and water. They gave them the sports 
drink because that gets into the bloodstream faster. They did not meet 
the lesser standard and, therefore, were cited by OSHA.
  Then there is the case of Mrs. Clay Espy, a rancher from Fort Davis, 
TX. She allowed a student from Texas A&M to do research on the plants 
on her ranch. He discovered a plant which he thought to be endangered 
and reported his finding. The Department of the Interior subsequently 
told Mrs. Espy that she could no longer graze the cattle on her family 
land. They had been grazing cattle there for over 100 years. But they 
were afraid that her cattle might eat this weed. Yes; eat the weed. It 
took a lawsuit and an expenditure of over $10,000 by Mrs. Espy before 
the Department reversed its ruling and declared that the weed was not, 
in fact, endangered.
  Even more absurd, if you can believe it, is the Texas small 
businessman who happened to have painted his office the day before an 
OSHA inspection, and he was cited for not having a material safety data 
sheet on his half-empty can of Sherwin-Williams paint.
  Then there is the employer cited at a job site, in which a hot 
roofing kettle was in use, because the job foreman was not wearing a 
long-sleeved shirt. The foreman was wearing a long-sleeved shirt but he 
rolled up his sleeves between his wrists and his elbows because of the 
weather.
  Recently OSHA contacted a parent company of a chain of convenience 
stores in Texas threatening to conduct compliance inspection after OSHA 
learned two employees had gotten into an argument and someone had 
thrown a punch and struck the other. Well, in Texas, that is not a big, 
unusual event, I have to say. But it was unusual to the OSHA 
representative who demanded a complete report of the incident and 
threatened to follow up with a compliance inspection if the report was 
not completely satisfactory and timely.
  Mr. President, these numerous horror stories which have come forward 
since we began our efforts for regulatory reform provide convincing, I 
hope, evidence of a Government regulatory process that is out of 
control. It demonstrates the need to introduce common sense and 
reasonableness into a system where these qualities seem to be sorely 
lacking.
  These cases also highlight the way the regulatory excess has been 
allowed to drift into absurdity. When was it decided and by whom that 
the Federal Government should become the national nanny? Indeed, the 
absurd is becoming the norm as millions of Americans who operate small 
businesses and work for a living know and understand. It is Congress 
that has refused to acknowledge how long overdue are the fundamental 
reforms that we need to bring common sense into the equation. We must 
recognize that the Federal Government cannot issue a rule that will fix 
every problem which involves human behavior.
  That is why one of the messages sent by the American people in 1992, 
and again in 1994, was, ``We have had enough, and you had better fix 
it.''
  Mr. President, that is what we are trying to do with this bill. It is 
one of the most important pieces of legislation that we will take up 
this year in the reform that the people asked us to make last year. 
Have we heard the message? That is really the question. I am not sure 
that everyone in Washington really understands. I am a small business 
person and I know what it is like to live with the regulations and the 
taxes that we have put on the small business people of our country.
  We must reverse this trend. Our Government must be put to the test. 
We must put our financial house in order, and we must decrease the size 
of the Federal Government and return many of these programs to the 
States.
  The 10th amendment says that the Federal Government will have certain 
specific powers, and everything not specifically reserved to the 
Federal Government will be left to the States and to the people. 
Somehow we have lost track of the 10th amendment, and we aim to get it 
back. And this bill, the Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act of 1995, 
is one way that we are going to get this country back on track and put 
the Government that is closest to the people down there in charge and 
to get the Washington bureaucrats--who have never been in small 
business, who really do not understand what it is like to meet a 
payroll, to worry about your employees, to not be sure if you are going 
to be able to feed the families that work for you--we are going to make 
sure that the Federal bureaucrats that do not understand that are no 
longer in control.
  If we are going to be able to compete in the global marketplace, we 
have to change the regulatory environment. We passed this year GATT and 
NAFTA last year. We did that to open markets. We wanted to open free 
trade in the world so that we would be able to export more. We will 
import more, too, but we will export more. But we have told American 
business, yes, we are going to give you free trade, but we are going to 
make you compete with one arm tied behind your back. We are going to 
put so many regulatory excesses on you that we are going to drive up 
the prices and the costs, and you are not going to be able to compete 
in this global economy that we have created for you.
  Let us put in perspective just how much this costs the businesses of 
our country. The businesses are the working people. The cost of 
complying with current Federal regulations is estimated at between $600 
and $800 billion a year.
  That is about the cost of the income tax. Corporate and individual 
taxes totaled almost $700 billion in 1994. So if you put the stealth 
tax of regulation, $600 to $800 billion a year on top of the income 
taxes that you pay, you can just double the checks that you wrote on 
April 15. You can double it because that is the stealth tax, the cost 
of Federal regulatory compliance.
  We need fundamental change to the current regulatory process. The 
Regulatory Reform Act of 1995 is what will make this happen.
  Businesses, especially small businesses, are finding it increasingly 
difficult to exist in this current regulatory environment--the same 
small business sector that is the engine of the economic growth of 
America. Government is not the economic engine of America. It is the 
small business people of this country that are the economic engine, and 
sometimes they think the Federal Government is trying to keep them from 
growing and prospering and creating the new jobs that keep this economy 
vital, so that we can absorb the new people into the system, the young 
people graduating from college, the immigrants that are coming to our 
shores for new opportunities. We have to make sure that those 
opportunities are there for our future generations.
  We have the responsibility to make sure that the regulators are doing 
what Congress intends for them to do. The Regulatory Reform Act of 1995 
is the way to restore congressional intent and hopefully, Mr. 
President, common sense. That is the mission that we must have this 
year, so that the people of America know we heard their voices last 
year and we are going to make the changes, however hard it may be, they 
asked us to make.
  So, Mr. President, regulatory reform is a very important step that we 
must take. We must balance the budget. We must have regulatory reform. 
We must have a fair taxation system. We must not raise taxes, but, in 
fact, we will lower taxes and give the people back the money they 
rightfully earn and should be able to spend for themselves.
  Mr. President, I thank you for helping us lead this country and do 
the right thing for the working people who are trying so hard to raise 
their families and do a little better for their families than maybe 
they were able to get as they were growing up.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  

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