[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2576-S2578]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Regulatory Reform

  Mr. President, we all want a strong economy. We want more jobs being 
made available. One of the reasons I am here on the floor today is to 
talk about not just the healthcare regulations that impact the ability 
of employers to hire employees, but we should also be talking about the 
regulatory environment in the United States.
  That is what I really want to talk about today, is this tremendous 
success we are beginning to have in just the first 3 months that 
President Trump has taken office. We have been successful in undoing a 
number of the regulatory hurdles that have been hindering job growth 
and prosperity in the United States.
  It has been 3 months now since the President took office, with a 
Republican-led Congress in place ready to help him advance policies 
that grow our economy and allow hard-working Americans to keep more of 
their paycheck each month.
  We are going to be talking a lot about tax reform, but we shouldn't 
forget about regulatory reform as well.
  One of the items with tax reform, some folks actually suggested a tax 
on items being brought into the United States--a border adjustment tax. 
One of the reasons for that was they thought we would be buying more 
American goods if we made those goods from other countries more 
expensive by putting a tax on them, which would be passed on to the 
consumers. I think that is the wrong approach.
  What we should be doing is allowing our consumers the availability of 
a less expensive American product, and the way you do that is we allow 
manufacturers in the United States to become more competitive. We do 
that by reducing their input costs, including a regulatory impact that 
is huge.
  We believe we should be creating an atmosphere in the United States 
for products to be produced at a cost that is less in the first place. 
We shouldn't have to increase the cost of other people's products 
coming into the United States. We should be making it less expensive 
for our producers to compete with them. The way we accomplish this, 
first and foremost, is by reducing the regulatory environment in 
America, which is way too intrusive, duplicative, and overreaching.
  If anyone is wondering how bad the regulatory environment is in the 
United States today, well, regulations cost the American people $1.9 
trillion annually, the bulk of which is handed down to consumers. 
Businesses don't absorb it, they pass it on.
  How are the consumers paying for it? Through higher prices on 
products and goods produced in the United States. If you are wondering 
why it is such a big deal, it is because we want our manufacturers, our 
producers, and our businesses in the United States to be able to 
compete with our competitors overseas, the ones that don't have the 
crippling regulatory environment we have here at home. Right now, our 
businesses and job creators are crippled by Federal regulations that 
limit their ability to expand and grow, to create more job 
opportunities, and pay higher wages.
  If the $1.9 trillion we spend annually on regulations were a country, 
it would be the 10th largest economy in the world, about the size of 
India or Russia's economy. Get this. We pay more as consumers for the 
cost of regulations at $1.9 trillion than we as taxpayers pay in 
personal income taxes on April 15. On April 15, we pay about $1.4 
trillion in personal income taxes, and yet we pay $1.9 trillion--one-
half trillion more in the costs of regulations.
  No other country in the world even comes close to this sort of 
unhealthy, costly regulatory environment. It is putting us at a 
competitive disadvantage in the international arena. While there has 
been a lot of focus this week on reforming our tax policy to get us 
back to the level of global competitiveness that we need, we must not 
lose sight of the need to reform our regulatory environment to one that 
invites growth and innovation. Both are needed. We have to reform our 
tax policy, and we absolutely have to reform our regulatory policies.
  Already in the first 3 months that President Trump has been in 
office, we have made progress in stopping harmful regulations from 
taking effect. Under the Congressional Review Act, the Senate has 
passed 13 resolutions so far this year to undo Obama-era regulations. 
The Congressional Review Act allows us to disapprove certain 
regulations that basically were approved by the administration or 
created by the administration over the last 6 months. The reason we are 
able to do it is because we can do it with just a majority vote. It is 
a privileged motion in the U.S. Senate. It is a majority vote in the 
House and takes a majority vote in the Senate. It doesn't require 60 
votes, so we are actually able to, with a majority vote, undo these 
regulations that were going to be imposed on the American public over 
the last 6 months. I think that is a step in the right direction. This 
is a program which in the past has been used only one time since it was 
created in the 1990s. We have done it 13 times in just these first 3 
months. The Congressional Review Act, or CRA, is truly an important 
oversight tool that allows Congress to undo Federal regulations issued 
by unelected bureaucrats at Federal agencies by this simple majority 
vote.
  For example, we have been able to reverse the Obama administration's 
education mandate which would have imposed Federal education standards 
to assess schools at the State and level local. We think that should be 
done at the State and local level.
  We also stopped an Obama regulation that would have imposed 
burdensome new restrictions on internet service providers that would do 
nothing to increase privacy protections for consumers. If you follow 
some of the misinformation that has been put out there, some people 
have suggested that we were taking away privacy that had been put in 
place by the last administration. Not true. Actually, what happened was 
that the courts had already stopped these provisions before they were 
ever put into effect.
  So, for the people who like the policy protections that are in place 
today,

[[Page S2577]]

they are still there. This was a new regulation that they were going to 
impose that took an entirely different approach to managing privacy. We 
were able to stop it. We have told the agencies to go back, to start 
over again, and to start following a similar course of action to what 
was already in place and that people already liked.
  The savings that come from undoing these and other regulations that 
we have stopped under the Congressional Review Act, combined with the 
President's Executive actions and rule delays, will save Americans, 
approximately, 52 million hours of paperwork annually and, if you 
accumulate what the costs are over an extended period of time, over $65 
billion in regulatory compliance costs. To the President's credit, he 
has also been busy using the tools he has available in order to undo 
burdensome regulations that are crippling growth.
  The new administration put a halt to the overreaching waters of the 
United States--or WOTUS--rule, requiring the Environmental Protection 
Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to review the WOTUS rule in 
order to make certain it promotes economic growth and minimizes 
regulatory uncertainty. I would suspect that this time around, rather 
than the last time around, they will actually be required to use sound 
science in making those determinations.
  It also stopped the Obama administration's costly Clean Power Plan, 
which would have required States to completely rework their electric 
grids and would have led to dramatically higher electricity bills for 
every single American in the country.
  Now, I am not suggesting that all rules are bad. Some rules are 
necessary for a government to operate in an orderly fashion and keep 
Americans safe, but too much regulation is costly and clearly stifles 
innovation. For the past 8 years, Americans have seen an unprecedented 
number of new rules and regulations that have been issued by unelected, 
unaccountable Washington bureaucrats.
  We are committed to changing that ``Washington knows best'' mentality 
because, at the end of the day, overregulation hurts families the most 
because they are the ones who are forced to pay more for goods and 
services when businesses are forced to spend exorbitant amounts of 
money just to put their products on the market.
  It is time for America to retake its position as a world leader in 
innovation. It is time for America to get busy on production again--
creating new job opportunities, selling more of our products at a 
competitive advantage overseas, affording young people new job 
opportunities and the ability to stay here in the United States, 
inviting more capital to come in because there is a better return on 
capital, which, once again, gets reinvested in the United States and, 
thus, grows our economy and allows us to be able to enjoy the services 
that economy supports.
  It is time to take a second look at regulations. It is time for the 
United States to be a leader again and for the American people to have 
the ability to have influence on the laws that are being created. Those 
laws should be voted on by their elected representatives, not imposed 
on them by unelected Washington bureaucrats.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kennedy). The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to follow up on the remarks that 
have just been made by our friend from South Dakota.
  During his first 100 days in office, President Trump has wasted no 
time in fulfilling one of his key promises and one of those promises 
that is hard to appreciate because, if bad things do not happen to you, 
it is hard to realize they did not happen. Yet there were many bad 
things in store for the American people and frankly a lot of bad things 
that have happened through the very kinds of regulations, over the last 
years, that Senator Rounds was talking about.
  Over the last 8 years, any time I had been traveling in Missouri, one 
of the top-of-mind issues with group after group had always been a 
different and more troublesome and more burdensome recent regulation by 
the Federal Government. I had heard about healthcare, but often I had 
heard about healthcare with regard to the irrational regulations that 
were being put out as part of the bill, and I had heard about taxes. 
Yet I would say that the No. 1 issue I had heard about for the whole 8 
years was that of out-of-control regulators who were clearly also not 
responsive to anybody and did not need to be. Frankly, in the second 4 
years of that Presidency, the regulators were even less responsive than 
they were in the first 4 years, and I think that is something that 
happens way too often.
  I hear from families, farmers, and job creators who tell me that the 
biggest barrier to job creation and economic growth is exactly what we 
are hearing about here this morning; that people do not think out the 
real consequences of the regulations.
  According to regulations.gov, Federal agencies finalized more than 
4,000 new regulations in 2016 alone. That was an average of 11 new 
regulations a day in the final year of the Obama Presidency. Let's 
think about that. Every one of those 4,000 regulations was a regulation 
that the country had lived without for the entire history of the 
country and that the Obama administration had lived without for 7 
years.
  A number of those regulations had been done so late that we had had a 
chance to look at them through the Congressional Review Act because 
they were still available to the new Congress. That is how late they 
happened. One of them went into effect on January 18, and the Obama 
administration was over at noon on January 20.
  They handed down a record-breaking 600 major new regulations that 
imposed more than $700 billion in costs on our economy. Senator Rounds 
just mentioned the estimated total annual compliance costs for 
regulations of $1.9 billion--almost $2 trillion. Imagine. If half of 
those regulations are either duplicative or unnecessary, talk about a 
stimulus, if somehow we go back and figure out how to eliminate the 
half that does not need to be done so one can really focus on the half 
that needs to be done. I am for every regulation that we absolutely 
have to have, but I am not for regulations that we do not absolutely 
have to have.
  What is worse is that the completely unnecessary aim of these 
regulations is frankly the amount of effort some of them require.
  There is a $12.3 billion regulation on efficiency standards for 
central air conditioners. Now, one has to find a lot of efficiency to 
find $12.3 billion in savings. That is a lot of efficiency. There is a 
$4.4 billion regulation that sets standards for ceiling fans. I like 
ceiling fans as much as the next person, but when you add $4.4 billion 
to standards, that has to be paid for by somebody just like the $3.6 
billion in regulations of the control of commercial vehicle operators.
  What the regulators so often do not seem to understand is that 
ultimately the consumers have to pay for the costs of these 
regulations. The cost of regulations is not really a reflection of the 
government's cost of being the regulator, it is the economic cost of 
having the regulations.
  That is why I have been particularly encouraged to see President 
Trump taking the steps he has taken to roll back many of the late 
efforts by the Obama administration. Since taking office, President 
Trump has signed 13 Congressional Review Act resolutions which, 
according to the administration, will save $10 billion in regulatory 
costs over a 10-year period of time. With regard to the Congressional 
Review Act, the Congress's passing a rejection of the rule and the 
President's agreeing to it happened exactly one time in 25 years prior 
to this administration. It has happened 13 times this year. It will 
happen, I am confident, a few more times, and it will have a real 
impact.
  When you look at the regulations that have been delayed or repealed 
by CRAs and Executive orders--Congressional Review Act resolutions or 
Executive orders--the American Action Forum estimates that $18.8 
billion would be saved annually. Now, the President is not going to get 
much credit for that, and the Congress is not either, but if in the 
last few weeks we figured out how to take an $18.8 billion burden off 
of people by not moving forward with regulations that the country had 
not had prior to just a few weeks ago, in some cases, that is a good 
thing.

[[Page S2578]]

  Many of the Missourians from whom I have heard are particularly 
relieved that the President is also moving back from a couple of 
rules--the power rule and the waters of the United States rule--that 
Federal courts, fortunately, up until now, had said to President 
Obama's administration they did not have the authority to do what they 
were trying to do in either of these rules. The rules would have had 
devastating impacts on job opportunities and on families in our State. 
The power rule would have doubled the utility bills in 10 or 12 years.
  I have been reminding Missourians over the last several months that 
if you do not think that is going to impact you when you pay your 
electric bill the next time, just write it right out of your checkbook 
one more time--write it--because that is what you would be doing 
sometime in the next decade and see what impact that has on the kinds 
of things you and your family would have been doing with the money that 
you would have been spending on twice your utility bill.
  A week ago, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was in our State, at the 
Thomas Hill powerplant, to talk about how these rules would have 
affected the State and how one can still fulfill the mission of the EPA 
for clean air and clean water and a better environment without having 
rules that devastate families as well as deal with problems, many of 
which have now been on the priority list for 10 years and longer and 
have never been dealt with, while the EPA has been coming up with 
something else to do. They would have driven up the cost of groceries. 
They would have driven up the cost of the utility bill itself. Of 
course, when the utility bill goes up, the utility bill work goes up, 
too, and work might not be there at double the utility bill.
  The combined cost savings is estimated to be as high as $67.3 billion 
over the very foreseeable future of the Congressional Review Act, the 
President's Executive orders, the announced decisions that they have 
made about things like the clean power rule and the waters of the 
United States rule. Even in Washington, $67.3 billion is a lot of 
money, not to mention the 52 million hours of paperwork that will be 
needed to comply with rules that were not necessary to be there and 
that Senator Rounds mentioned.
  Our economy cannot grow and thrive with billions of dollars' worth of 
regulations dragging it down. Let me say again that I am for every 
regulation that we absolutely have to have--there is no argument about 
that--but we need to have a process by which we know whether we have to 
have them. That is why, in the next few weeks, I plan to reintroduce 
the bipartisan Regulatory Improvement Act, which the Congress looked at 
last year.
  This bill would create a Regulatory Improvement Commission that would 
review outdated regulations with the goal of bringing the list back to 
the Congress and saying that we think that these can all be eliminated.
  I have also cosponsored an act called the REINS Act, which would give 
me and the rest of the Congress the obligation to vote on any 
regulation that has more than $100 million of impact on the economy so 
that if we need it, we are going to go home and justify it, and the 
American people--where I live and the Presiding Officer lives--can get 
their hands on us if we cannot explain why we thought it was a good 
idea to do that.
  I believe the government should work for the American people, not the 
other way around, and I believe the President and the Congress have 
taken advantage of this historic opportunity to drive that peg a little 
deeper in the ground.
  I look forward to continuing to work on these issues. I think we need 
to take more responsibility for these issues. I know some of our 
colleagues have said: Well, why did we repeal these late regulations? 
Well, they were late regulations for a reason, and the country had done 
just fine without them up until now.
  So I look forward to working with the Presiding Officer and others to 
continue working on this effort to have regulations that make sense 
when we need them and not to have regulations when we don't need them.