[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2590-S2592]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                Regulatory Reform and the Budget Process

  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, there is a lot of conversation about all 
that is moving this week in the Senate and the House and the executive 
branch. There is a lot of conversation about 100 days. It is somewhat 
of a look back, and it is reasonable for Americans to be able to look 
back and say the beginning of a new Presidency or the beginning of a 
new session of Congress has begun and what has already happened. There 
has been quite a bit that has actually happened, but let me highlight 
one specific area. I want to highlight an area that has moved and to, 
quite frankly, highlight an area that has not.

  What has moved has been a lot of conversation about regulation. When 
I walked into Congress just a few years ago, I had a lot of people in 
my State who would catch me and ask for one specific thing. They said: 
I don't want anything other than to make it stop. Because every time 
they get news, every time they open up something from an association or 
try to be able to track something, all they got was a new regulation. 
Some of them were large and some small, but it seemed like every time 
they opened the mail, they had a new requirement from some entity they 
had never heard of, 1,000 miles away, telling them how to operate their 
business or to submit some new form. Whether they are a school or a 
hospital or a small business or a large business, whether they are 
doing manufacturing or are service-oriented or technology, the flood of 
regulations coming out of Washington, DC, caused people around my State 
to say: Make it stop; we are trying to catch up. And literally they are 
hiring more people for compliance than they are to actually do what 
their business is designed to do. At some point, they want to hire 
somebody to actually do their business.
  A dramatic shift happened starting January 20 of this year when the 
administration stepped in and for a moment said: Pause on regulations. 
And literally the Nation could take a deep breath. They didn't turn 
anything back. They didn't turn anything off. America didn't become 
less safe. They asked a simple question: How can people actually get 
involved in the process? And before a regulation comes out, we make 
sure that it is, No. 1, consistent with the law, and No. 2, that the 
people who are affected by it actually get a chance to raise their 
hands and say: When you do a regulation, make sure you consider this.
  It doesn't seem unreasonable. If we are going to be a nation of the 
people, by the people, and for the people, it is a good idea to have 
people involved in the process of the regulations that affect them. The 
government should not be their enemy. The government should be their 
ally. It should be the way to make sure that we have fair rules, that 
everyone has a consistent set of guidelines and that those guidelines 
don't change all the time.
  Before this year, there had been only one time in the past decade 
that the Congressional Review Act was used. The Congressional Review 
Act was actually due to a fellow Oklahoman named Don Nickles who, in 
the Senate years ago, passed a simple piece of legislation to say that 
if a regulation is promulgated by an administration--any 
administration--that is not consistent with the desires of Congress, 
that Congress can pull it back out in the first few days after it was 
passed, and most of the time, it is legislative days--it is actually 
months in calendar time. In the first few months it is in existence, 
Congress can pull that regulation out and look at it and say: Is this 
consistent with what Congress passed? If it is not, Congress would have 
a fast-track process to be able to look at it and say: This is 
inconsistent with what Congress desired when it passed the law; that it 
had to go through the House, the Senate, and then to the White House to 
be signed. That has happened only one time.
  In the past few months, Congress has passed now 13 Congressional 
Review Acts--13 different reviews of different regulations that were 
put down by the previous administration in their final months, some of 
them in their final days of--the administration--an administration that 
lasted 8 full years. These were the things they crammed into the very 
end, what are called midnight regulations. Those regulations cost 
billions of dollars, and some had very little review. Thirteen 
different times this Congress has pulled those out. It is literally 
billions of dollars in regulations that were laid on the economy and 
millions of hours of work on people filling out compliance forms and 
submitting things to Washington, DC, that most likely no one will ever 
read.
  Those thirteen bills that have now been signed into law have helped 
free up our economy, and it has started a process that is very simple: 
What do we do to make sure that we have good regulations as a nation, 
that they stay consistent and have the maximum number of people 
involved?
  The administration has also laid out something that many called a 
radical idea; that is, for every one regulation that goes in, an agency 
would pull two out; to go back and review old regulations and say: Are 
there other regulations that need to come out? For those who have 
called this a radical idea, I have had to smile and say: You realize 
the United Kingdom has done that for years. Canada has done that for 
years. Australia has done that for years.

[[Page S2591]]

  It is not a radical, crazy idea; it is a simple statement to say that 
when regulations go in, we need to have consideration for those who are 
already regulated and say: Are we burying them in new compliance 
requirements? Is there an area where we can help free them of things 
that are not needed anymore, that are old, that are not used or not 
even appropriate anymore? It is a reasonable thing to be able to look 
at. It is not in statute, it is an Executive order, but it is one of 
those things that I think are wise for agencies to be able to take a 
look at.
  Every administration over the past several decades has said they are 
going to do what is called a retrospective review--go back and look at 
it. This administration has said: We are really going to look at it. If 
a new regulation goes in, we have to go back and review and see if two 
can come out at the same time, to force that retrospective review.
  Many other areas of regulations are coming out, but the primary issue 
that has come out is very simple; that is, slowing down the process and 
making sure it is wise to be able to impose new regulations. We should 
have them in health and safety areas, but we shouldn't do regulations 
just because someone in Washington, DC, thinks it is a good idea to be 
able to run everyone else's business.

  With any set of decisions made by the executive branch, we should 
resolve many of these things in law. The Congressional Review Act--
those are all in law. Those have all been settled. The executive 
actions like the ``one in, two out''--that is an executive action. A 
future executive can flip it back around and say: We are not going to 
go back and review it at all.
  I proposed a whole series of issues that we need to deal with on 
regulatory actions. I chair the Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee, in 
fact. We have had very bipartisan conversations to say: Where can we 
find common ground, and what do we need to do to be able to resolve 
this issue of regulations just showing up?
  So we have set out a simple set of ideas, one beginning in small 
business. If we are going to start with regulatory issues, let's start 
in the area where we have the greatest amount of agreement; that is, on 
small businesses. Small businesses should have an opportunity to have a 
voice at the table. Now, when regulations are put out, often those 
regulations are put out and only the largest businesses are consulted 
on them--those that might have lobbyists or government relations or 
have a team of attorneys to be able to go engage with the Federal 
Government and get their input considered.
  We required years ago that small businesses get a voice. The problem 
is, many agencies actually don't do it. We need to be able to press the 
issue and put into statute an absolute requirement that small 
businesses be consulted. So when a regulation is created, the people 
who are affected the most--like in my State of Oklahoma, where 97 
percent of the businesses are small businesses--that those folks 
actually get a voice.
  It may shock some people in this Chamber to know that small business 
owners in Oklahoma don't wake up every day and read the Federal 
Register to see if there is an area they have to give notice and 
comment to. It may be stunning to know that they don't have a team of 
lawyers at every small business. In fact, there are towns in Oklahoma 
where there are many small businesses but there is not a lawyer in that 
town. We should not require every business to hire attorneys and to 
read the Federal Register every day for them to be able to stay in 
business. We should actually reach out to them and say: We are not 
opposed to small businesses; we want to make sure we facilitate them.
  Here is a simple idea of many ideas in the small business bill that I 
have--not only getting greater input and to make sure they are in 
consideration, but how about this simple idea: If there is a paperwork 
violation for a small business, they are not fined immediately. They 
have forgiveness for that first-time offense. Many of them didn't even 
know there was a certain amount of paperwork that had to be turned in. 
It showed up as a requirement in the Federal Register. They are running 
their small business. They weren't tracking it. Someone comes in and 
evaluates and says ``There is a piece of paper you haven't turned in'' 
and drops a $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 fine on them for not submitting 
something, and they had no idea what it was.
  First-time paperwork forgiveness is a simple idea. To actually be 
engaged where the Federal Government can go to a small business and say 
``Hey, you missed one,'' and if they are not health or safety related 
issues, we give them forgiveness in the process--why should that be so 
hard for us to do?
  We have another piece of legislation we proposed called early 
participation in regulations. Before a regulation is written by an 
agency, this would require that they actually put out the word that 
they are thinking about writing a regulation on a certain topic and get 
as much input as they can, so before they even write the regulation and 
we are fighting over whether we should use ``or'' or ``and'' in a 
section, we actually talk about whether it is needed at all, or if they 
are going to write it, make sure it has these certain issues in it--
again, getting more people involved in the process.
  Just a week ago, there was a march through this town and through many 
towns saying: We need to have great science in our Nation. I could not 
agree more. We should have quality science in our research. We should 
have engagement from science when we put policy papers together.
  One of the challenges we currently have and one of the things we are 
trying to correct with another piece of legislation is just on using 
best science, just requiring agencies, when they make a decision about 
something in a regulation, to actually use peer-reviewed, good science 
that can be shared with other people. We bump into issues now commonly 
with agencies where they say they have made a decision on some of the 
regulations, and we ask for the science behind it, and they say that 
the science is proprietary and they can't share it with us or the 
American people. The American people aren't good about withholding a 
secret on something that actually affects their day-to-day life. Don't 
lay a new requirement on them and tell them: Trust us--we have thought 
about this, and this is the right way to go. Americans aren't great 
with that. They just want to be able to know the facts behind it so 
they can see that science themselves.
  So getting best science is something we have talked about within the 
framework of the Administrative Procedures Act for a long time--
something many administrations for the past several decades have said 
we should do. Well, let's go ahead and do it, and let's require that we 
actually have best science out there.
  This body, with a voice vote, just a year ago, passed a bill called 
TSCA. That TSCA bill dealt with chemicals and how we are going to 
approve chemicals and how the EPA can do it. We put new language in 
that requiring good science, peer-reviewed science, and on a voice vote 
from everyone in this body, we agreed that is the best way to handle 
science on chemicals.
  So what did I do? I took that exact language that we all agreed to on 
TSCA and said: Let's apply that to every agency so that whenever an 
agency of any type makes a decision that is science-based, it has good 
transparency and it is peer-reviewed. We have agreed that the EPA 
should do it dealing with chemicals; let's agree that everyone should 
do it. Let's agree on how we handle guidance, to not allow agencies to 
be able to create guidance documents. Let's have good transparency and 
simplicity.
  We have a simple bill, as odd as this may sound, that just says that 
for whatever regulation is out there, the agencies also have to put a 
description out on it in plain language that a non-attorney can 
understand in just 100 words, just a 100-word description of what it 
is. Right now there are folks who actually do try to research things, 
and if you are not a trained attorney, you can't even understand what 
it means. So just plain-language descriptions of regulations are called 
for.
  These should all be areas of common ground. These should all be 
straightforward issues that aren't partisan issues but are commonsense 
issues.
  We have made progress on regulations over the past 100 days. The 
American people have now been able to take a breath as regulations are 
not coming

[[Page S2592]]

out at rapid speed. We still need them, though. In the days ahead, we 
need to do good regulations, so let's figure out a good way to do it.
  Let me make one more note on the opposite side. We have made progress 
in regulations, with a ways to go. Where we have not made progress in 
the past 100 days is on how we do budgeting.
  There is a group of us who have talked for several years now and have 
said that we have to change the way we do budgeting. Year after year, 
the American people have said: Are we going to have another continuing 
resolution? Are we going to have another omnibus bill? Are we going to 
be late again on budgeting?
  Year after year, Congress has said: Yes, we are.
  Folks around my State occasionally catch me and say: This is 
different.
  I smile at them and say: No, it is not different.
  The way we do budgeting was created right after Watergate in 1974 to 
create a more transparent process. What they actually created was a 
process so difficult that it has only worked four times since 1974--
four times. So if it feels like every year you are saying ``How come 
the budget process didn't work again?'' it is because every year but 
four, since 1974, the budget process didn't work.
  At some point, we have to say: The budget process is not in the 
Constitution. Let's change the way we are doing the process. They were 
well-meaning in 1974 when they made that process; it just didn't work. 
So let's fix it instead of saying that once again it didn't work.
  We will never get a better product on our budget until we fix the 
process of our budget. We will never be able to solve the budget debt 
and deficit issues we have with this continuing resolution autopilot 
system and with an omnibus system that seems to just perpetuate the 
same issues over and over again.
  We have made specific proposals: doing the budget every 2 years, 
getting time to get more predictability, to get more time to be able to 
walk through the research of it; eliminating budget gimmicks, and there 
are a mess of budget gimmicks that are out there; and getting a better 
long-term view. The budget has what is called a 10-year window now, 
where we have to budget over 10 years. So what happens? Congress 
creates a budget that blows up in the 11th year. Well, that has been 
done year after year after year, and we have a lot of eleventh-hour 
years now stacking up and a lot of major problems that are out there.
  We need to find a way to prevent us from ever having to get in a 
conversation about a government shutdown. We have a bill called the 
government shutdown prevention bill that would keep us from ever having 
that, and it would put the pressure back on Congress and the White 
House to resolve the issues but would prevent us from ever having a 
government shutdown fight. We shouldn't argue about whether the 
government is going to be opened or closed. We should argue about how 
we are going to handle the issue of budgeting and how we are going to 
actually be able to get us back to balance.

  There are a lot of simple, commonsense things that are out there that 
we can do, but we as a body have agreed that we are going to actually 
tackle the way we do budgeting. That is going to involve some focus and 
some time commitment and a risk to say: How it was done in the 1970s is 
not the way we should do it now. It didn't work. Let's change the 
system so we can actually get us back on track and bring some 
predictability again to what we are doing.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.