[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 71 (Monday, May 11, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2754-S2755]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                              DEREGULATION

 Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the 
Record a copy of my remarks at the American Action Forum.
  The remarks follow.


                              DEREGULATION

       Thank you for what the American Action Forum does. I've had 
     a burr under my saddle for a long time about too much federal 
     regulation. You always in politics have a hot button. That's 
     my hot button. I had it when I was governor. I had it when I 
     was university president. I had it when I was Education 
     Secretary. I probably contributed to it when I was Education 
     Secretary, so I've been trying ever since to do something 
     about it.
       Overregulation is annoying. It wastes time and money. It 
     interferes with prompt decision making. It superimposes 
     someone else's judgment on what you are trying to do. It 
     interferes with your freedom. It comes from Washington, D.C. 
     It usually prescribes a one-size-fits-all solution that 
     doesn't fit the world in which you live.
       Washington, D.C., in my judgment, is populated by too many 
     elected officials of both political parties who think that 
     because they take a one-hour airplane ride from their 
     hometown that they suddenly get smarter when they get here.
       Nothing used to make me more mad as governor than to look 
     up towards Washington and see some member of Congress coming 
     up with a big idea, holding a press conference, passing a 
     law, taking credit for some great leap forward and sending 
     the bill to me as governor. Then the next thing I know, that 
     congressman would be home in Tennessee at the Lincoln Day 
     Dinner or the Jackson Day Dinner giving a big speech about 
     local control.
       So, I've had a burr under my saddle for a long time about 
     too much federal regulation.
       I'm going to talk about two subjects this morning: 
     overregulation of higher education and regulatory guidance. 
     What connects the two? Federal government overreach.
       The case of higher education has been the piling up of 
     well-intentioned regulations that strangle our 6,000 colleges 
     and universities.
       The case of regulatory guidance, is the inclination of our 
     legislative bureaucrats to forget why we had an American 
     Revolution, which was against a king.
       The agencies appear to be using guidance, which is free of 
     notice and comment requirements--that means that people don't 
     have any say about it--to put binding requirements on 
     American businesses and colleges and universities.
       To solve the problem, we have to have a bipartisan desire 
     in Congress to weed the garden of bad laws and bad 
     regulations and keep the garden clear. It's always been very 
     hard to pass a law in this country. It ought to be very hard 
     also to create a new regulation.
       The good news is I believe for the first time in a long 
     time there is bipartisan interest in weeding that garden. I'd 
     like to tell you a little bit more about it.
       Let me begin with higher education regulations.
       Sometimes it's best to approach an issue with examples, so 
     let me use three.
       More than a year ago, Vanderbilt University in Nashville 
     hired the Boston Consulting Group to determine how much it 
     costs the university to comply with federal rules and 
     regulations on higher education.
       The answer: $150 million in a single year--or 11% of the 
     university's total non-hospital expenditures.
       Chancellor Nick Zeppos of Vanderbilt says this adds about 
     $11,000 in additional tuition per year for each of the 
     university's 12,700 students.
       The second example:
       Each year, twenty million families fill out a complicated 
     108-question form called the FAFSA.
       108 questions. Now, think about this: 20 million American 
     families fill this out. If you want a federal grant or you 
     want a federal loan, you fill this out first and you fill it 
     out every year. Now, you can do it online. After you've done 
     it a few times, you know, it gets easier. But, several of our 
     experts in this country that came from all different 
     directions testified before our education committee in 
     Congress that we only really needed two questions. What's 
     your family income? And what's the family size? That would 
     give you 95% of what you needed to know for the government to 
     give out the $100 billion of student loans and the $33 
     billion of Pell grants that it gives out every year.
       So, Senator Michael Bennet and I and Cory Booker and 
     Richard Burr and Johnny Isakson, six of us, Democrats and 
     Republicans have a bill in to cut this FAFSA to the two-
     question short form.
       Now, we may not get that far, but it'll be closer to this 
     short form than the FAFSA when we get through.
       And, the President has even said he thinks it is a good 
     idea. In his budget, he said that he could think of thirty or 
     forty questions that could come off this.
       Now, these aren't evil people who are putting questions on 
     here. They're just well-intentioned people who say now, I've 
     got an idea. I'd like to know this. They don't think about 
     the fact that 20 million people have to fill this out.
       The problem with this is a couple of obvious things. One is 
     it wastes time and money. But the other problem is it 
     discourages people from going to college who we'd like to 
     have go.
       The President of Southwest Community College in Memphis 
     said he thinks he loses 1,500 students each semester because 
     of the complexity of the form.
       Tennessee has become the first state to make community 
     college tuition free for qualifying students, but first every 
     applicant must fill out that FAFSA. Now that tuition is free, 
     the principle obstacle to a Tennessee high school senior 
     going to community college is a federal, complicated set of 
     regulations.
       The third example: Ten years ago and again three years ago, 
     surveys by the National Academy of Sciences--not the 
     Republican National Committee, the National Academy of 
     Sciences--found that principle investigators spend 42 percent 
     of their time associated with federal research projects on 
     administrative tasks instead of research.
       I then asked the head of the National Academies what a 
     reasonable period of time would be for a researcher to spend 
     on administrative tasks. He said, well, maybe about 10 
     percent.
       Now, think about how many billions we could save.
       We, taxpayers give NIH $30 billion a year, $24 billion to 
     research and development at colleges and universities.
       The President has asked for another billion for NIH 
     research. The Republican House has said let's make it $2 
     billion more every year.
       But, the average annual cost of NIH research projects is 
     $480,000, and if we reduce spending on unnecessary red tape 
     by $1 billion, we could potentially fund a thousand multi-
     year grants.
       Twenty-four of the 30 billion dollars that goes to NIH goes 
     to university-based research. At the moment, 42% of an 
     investigator's time is spent on administrative tasks.
       This piling up of regulations is one of the greatest 
     obstacles to innovation and cost consciousness in higher 
     education has become--and the reason is us, the federal 
     government.
       So if all of us created the mess, then it is up to all of 
     us to fix it.
       We've begun to do that.
       Here's the good news: On the Senate education committee, 
     which I chair, there is a bipartisan effort to examine these 
     regulations--to identify which ones are the problems, and see 
     if we can get rid of them or simplify them.
       More than a year ago, four members of the committee--
     Senator Mikulski and Senator Bennet, two Democrats, and 
     Senator Burr and I, two Republicans--asked a group of 
     distinguished educators to examine the federal rules and 
     regulations for colleges and universities. They returned to 
     us a document with 59 specific recommendations--requirements 
     and areas for Congress and the Department of Education to 
     consider--including 10 that were especially problematic. They 
     told us that the colleges and universities were operating, in 
     their words, in a ``jungle of red tape.''
       I had a letter from a university president in Missouri who 
     said that in his forty years of being in higher education, he 
     had never been so oppressed by regulations.
       Most of these are common-sensical things; for example, in 
     our proposal to fix the student aid form, we suggest that 
     students apply for student aid in their junior year in high 
     school instead of their senior year.
       Now, why does that make so much difference?
       Well, one is if you know in your junior year, you're going 
     to get this much in a Pell grant and this much in a loan, you 
     can shop around and know where you're going.
       Right now, you don't know the amount of money you'll get 
     until after you're already enrolled in the school. So, that 
     doesn't make any sense. In addition, you're asked in your 
     senior year, which is the current way they do it, to report 
     what your tax returns showed. Well, you haven't filed your 
     tax returns yet for that year.
       So, there are all sorts of unnecessary confusion, which 
     could be solved by just moving the application time from the 
     senior year in high school to the junior year.
       The other area is regulatory guidance. Now, this is the 
     kind of subject that usually puts people right to sleep--
     unless you're a

[[Page S2755]]

     victim of it--but we see the ugly effects of government 
     overreach.
       It's very hard to pass a law in this country for good 
     reason.
       Our revolution was against a king. We chose to be 
     represented by an elected Congress. They're the ones who are 
     supposed to make the laws. Our Constitution makes it pretty 
     hard to pass a law.
       In some of our laws, Congress delegates some of the details 
     of how to implement the laws to federal agencies--but it does 
     it with specific requirements: Before those rules come out, 
     the people who are governed have a chance to have a say. 
     That's called notice and comment before you have a federal 
     regulation.
       Well, what's happening today is some of these agencies are 
     using something called guidance to get around that 
     requirement, to use the guidance as a non-binding way to tell 
     the people. It's supposed to be a non-binding way of 
     suggesting to people how to follow regulations that are 
     properly in place, but what the agencies are doing is using 
     the guidance to make new laws.
       For example, I asked the assistant secretary for Civil 
     Rights at the U.S. Department of Education last year, whether 
     she expects our more than 6,000 colleges and universities to 
     comply with her agency's guidance--these are issued without 
     any sort of notice or comment.
       She answered, ``We do.''
       So her agency is writing detailed guidance governing 22 
     million students on 7,200 campuses and it could be some 
     individual's whim or idea.
       How frequent is this? The distinguished group of educators 
     led by the Vanderbilt Chancellor and the University of 
     Maryland Chancellor who recommended the 59 changes in 
     regulations that I talked about said that every single work 
     day, on average, there's a new guidance or rule from the U.S. 
     Department of Education to a college and university.
       So, here you are operating with federal grants and loans at 
     a Catholic college out in the Midwest, and you know every 
     single day something's going to change from Washington about 
     what you're doing.
       It's very important that Congress make the law. It's very 
     important because Congress answers to the people. That's the 
     way our government ought to work.
       When Congress isn't doing its job, the people can throw the 
     bums out. It is very hard for the voters to do that to an 
     unelected bureaucrat, say in the Civil Rights office at the 
     U.S. Department of Education.
       So, I'm about to begin a project with one of our 
     outstanding new senators, James Lankford of Oklahoma, to 
     examine whether agencies are abusing guidance and how to 
     solve that problem.
       Thank you for inviting me here to speak to you today about 
     this burr that's been in my saddle for a long, long time.
       I think that what you are trying to achieve here today is 
     one of the most important things we can do in Washington--
     because as hard as it is to pass a law, it is almost harder 
     to end one.
       Probably the most famous comment about that came from 
     Ronald Reagan who said: ``No government ever voluntarily 
     reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, 
     never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest 
     thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!''
       Well, at least once or twice, I'd like to prove him wrong.
       Thank you very much.

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