[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2582-S2584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Regulatory Accountability Act

  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about legislation to 
give our economy a shot in the arm and to help raise wages for 
Americans all across our country.
  When I am back home, whether it is at a small auto body shop or 
whether it is at a big steel plant or whether it is at a soybean farm, 
I hear the same thing, which is people coming up to me and saying: Hey, 
Rob, with all of these regulations coming from Washington, I would love 
to hire more people, but I am spending too much time and money trying 
to keep up with these regulations.
  I think that is true with every Member here, whether you are a 
Democrat or a Republican, when you are back home talking to people. 
They get frustrated. Sometimes it is local and State regulations as 
well, but a lot of them are coming from the Federal Government.
  One example would be the Whitacre Greer Company, which makes bricks. 
It is a small family-owned business in Alliance, OH, just outside of 
Youngstown. They told me recently that complying with just one 
regulation is now costing this small company almost a million bucks a 
year that they don't have. They have had to go out and borrow the 
money, and that has been difficult for them. The cost of just complying 
with this one new regulation is about 10 percent of their annual 
revenue. Otherwise, that roughly million bucks would have been 
invested, they say, in plant, equipment and people. In other words, 
they would be able to create more jobs and modernize their facility if 
not for that compliance cost.
  They are not alone. It is happening all over Ohio and across the 
country. Costly regulations are causing companies to pull back on 
expanding jobs and creating more opportunity for the people we 
represent.
  Look, regulation has its place. There is no question about it. We 
need regulations. I think everybody acknowledges that. It has a proper 
role. We need reasonable laws that protect our health and the 
environment and prevent dishonest business practices. But let's make 
sure that, as we regulate more and more and more, we have smart 
regulations--regulations that make sense and that don't affect these 
small businesses, as I talked about with this brick company in 
Alliance, OH.
  The reality today is that a lot of Federal regulations are more 
extensive in scope, more expensive to these companies--and, therefore, 
these workers--more unpredictable than they have to be to meet whatever 
the policy objectives are.
  So Congress writes a law, and we have certain policy objectives, but 
then the regulators take that and they change the spirit of the 
congressional law instead of meeting that objective in the most cost-
effective way possible. So I get that from my constituents, and the 
question is this: What do we do about it?
  The other thing I hear about is the fact that regulators aren't 
accessible. People don't feel like they have any influence over it.
  By keeping new businesses from starting and small businesses from 
growing, regulations are just making it harder for people to be able to 
make a living.
  So how did we get here? Why are regulations so expensive and so 
burdensome on workers and jobs? I think a big reason is the way the 
Federal Government goes about writing regulations. Too often the 
process is unaccountable to the people. Too often it is based on sloppy 
or even bad information.
  The current law that gives us the basic framework for all this 
process is called the Administrative Procedure Act. This has been 
around for a long time. But guess what. It has not been reformed in any 
significant way in 70 years.
  The APA, or the Administrative Procedure Act, is something I have 
studied

[[Page S2583]]

in law school, as did other people here in this Chamber. It is 
something that you would expect to sort of change with the times, but 
it simply hasn't. That doesn't make sense.
  Imagine if we didn't update our healthcare laws for 70 years. We are 
talking right now about updating the healthcare laws that were passed 7 
years ago. Imagine if we didn't update our immigration laws for 70 
years. Imagine if we didn't update our criminal laws for 70 years. You 
know, the world changes. It just doesn't make any sense not to update 
our regulation policy because we live in a growing and dynamic economy. 
Things are changing, and we have changed a lot in the last 70 years.
  We didn't have things like microwave ovens or color TVs, and our 
economy was 10 percent the size of what it is today. Yet we are still 
using the same regulatory process that was put in place for a totally 
different kind of economy.
  By the way, in 70 years, we have also learned a lot about how to 
regulate in a way that it is more cost effective and more efficient, 
and we need to put that into practice. So a reform of our regulatory 
process, in my view, is long overdue.
  So far this year, we have taken some steps here in the Congress to 
give small businesses very specific regulatory relief by rescinding 
some of the recent regulations that the Obama administration had 
promulgated. We have done this about 10 times now with what is called 
the congressional review process. It is estimated that this has saved 
the economy a total of $65 billion in regulatory costs and about 45 
million hours of paperwork.
  I have supported most of these Congressional Review Act bills because 
I think they make sense. But this is just a handful of recent 
regulations. We have only addressed a few of the symptoms, not the 
underlying cause. We still have to deal with the underlying problem of 
the way regulations get made. If we don't do that, the regulatory 
burden will just continue to increase.
  By the way, this should be true whether it is a Republican 
administration or a Democratic administration. The same rules ought to 
apply.
  All of this is why yesterday Senator Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota 
and I introduced bipartisan legislation called the Regulatory 
Accountability Act, or the RAA, which would put in place some really 
important and very reasonable safeguards on the regulatory process to 
get better outcomes.
  Every President since Ronald Reagan--Republican and Democrat alike--
has agreed with the idea that regulatory agencies should estimate the 
costs and the benefits of something that we all accept. So they put 
this into what are called Executive orders saying that they have to go 
through the cost-benefit analysis the same way that your family does 
and that families in Ohio do when they make a decision as to whether to 
buy that car or whether they can afford to send their kids to college. 
They figure out what it will cost and what the benefit will be. That 
has to go into regulations. Although every President from Ronald Reagan 
to Barack Obama has agreed on the need for that, it has never been put 
into law.
  The first thing this legislation does is very simple. The Regulatory 
Accountability Act--the RAA--says that there should be a law, we should 
codify the practice so that businesses have the predictability of 
knowing that regulations are going to continue to use that commonsense 
cost-benefit practice.
  The Regulatory Accountability Act would then take the next step of 
requiring regulatory agencies, once they have figured out the costs and 
benefits of these proposals, to choose the most cost-effective way to 
achieve their policy objectives. That is common sense, right? It is not 
done now. This is a big change and an important part of the 
legislation. Again, it is the same thing people do every day with their 
families. When they are deciding where they are going to go to school 
or what brand of milk they are going to choose, they go through that 
kind of analysis. Let's find the most cost-effective way to accomplish 
the goal, one that costs less and has the least impact on the ability 
to create jobs.
  As I said before, a lot of regulations are expensive. According to 
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, from 2009 to 2014, in 
those 5 years, the Federal Government published more than 80 major 
rules a year, every year. A major rule costs the economy more than $100 
million a year, and there have been 80 a year.
  For these major rules, the RAA would let stakeholders ask a court to 
review the cost-benefit analysis used by the regulators, so that we 
ensure that agencies are using the best information available, not 
relying on faulty information or making mistakes. That seems fair to 
me, that we should have some process to make sure they are doing the 
right thing. This is going to have a huge impact on regulations.
  The RAA makes regulators more accountable by bringing the public into 
the process. When folks talk about regulations, a lot of the time, 
their concern is that they feel they are cut off from the process. 
Although they can come to me or their other elected officials and state 
their concerns about this or that law, they have no access to the 
regulators. They are not elected; they don't feel as if they are 
accountable. They can't complain to them, and there is no influence if 
they do.
  So under the RAA, agencies would have to listen to public comments 
and proposals before making a decision. Again, this is an important 
change. Instead of waiting until after the decision has been made and 
potentially triggering years of litigation, the RAA would move up that 
process. An ounce of prevention, my colleagues, is worth at least a 
pound of cure. It is a lot better for our companies and for job 
creation to put some time into the effort upfront to get it right than 
to have to fix it later. I think it is better for the regulatory 
process and better for a smart regulatory process in terms of taking 
our laws and putting them into practice.
  So the RAA requires agencies to choose the most cost-effective 
regulations, creates more accountability by involving the public, 
ensures we are using better information, and takes existing practice 
and puts it into law. Ultimately, this is going to make smarter rules 
with better outcomes and will give us a better environment for creating 
more jobs with better wages. The RAA will free up more resources for 
small businesses to hire more people, raise wages, and purchase more 
equipment. That will boost economic growth and benefit all of us.
  There are some critics who have suggested that this bill will kill 
the regulatory process and prevent new regulations from being issued, 
but clearly they have not read the bill. The reason this bill is 
bipartisan is because it gives the American people a voice in the 
regulatory process and it makes it more effective for both our economy 
and for our health and safety. That is the kind of commonsense 
regulatory process that hard-working taxpayers expect and deserve from 
their government.
  We have a lot of support for this bill from workers all over the 
country and from a wide variety of industries, including organizations 
representing truckers, farmers, electricians, and manufacturers. It is 
a bipartisan bill because it is a common-ground bill. It is a middle-
ground bill.
  I first introduced the RAA 6 years ago, and it has passed the House 
of Representatives five times. By the way, on one of those stand-alone 
votes, 19 Democrats in the House supported it. Some Democrats who serve 
in the Senate today have supported it in the past; they were House 
Members then. By the way, that was when the regulatory burden was less 
of a problem than it is today. I have always had Democratic cosponsors 
of the RAA when I have introduced it here in the Senate.
  I am happy to have Senator Heitkamp, Senator Manchin, and Senator 
Hatch as the original cosponsors to this legislation because this idea 
is needed now more than ever. It is a great opportunity to break 
through the partisan gridlock and get something that creates more jobs, 
raises wages, and makes a difference in people's lives. I think that is 
what the American people are looking for. That is what my neighbors in 
Ohio tell me. They want us to get stuff done to help families. I urge 
my colleagues to join Senator Heitkamp, Senator Hatch, Senator Manchin, 
and me in supporting this legislation that will create

[[Page S2584]]

a more stable and reliable regulatory process and give the people we 
represent more opportunity.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield back my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.