[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 1880]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              FEDERAL REGULATIONS BURDEN SMALL BUSINESSES

  (Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, small businesses, the 
backbone of our economy, continue to be unfairly saddled by one-size-
fits-all regulations. Most small businesses do not have the capacity to 
retain in-house legal or compliance departments, and unfortunately, 
many agencies often neglect their duties of assessing how new 
regulations may impact small businesses. There is also a pattern of 
Federal agencies providing inadequate analyses of the long-term 
economic costs of the rules that they propose.
  Despite the President's promise in January of 2011 to ``eliminate 
excessive and unjustified burdens on small businesses,'' very little 
has been done by this administration.
  Yesterday, the House passed H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates 
Information and Transparency Act of 2015, which would require greater 
transparency of the Federal Government costs associated with unfunded 
mandates. I joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to approve 
a commonsense solution to reducing cost by improving transparency, 
awareness, and accountability in our Federal agencies. Just moments 
ago, the House passed H.R. 527, which would require better economic 
analyses of direct and indirect costs on small businesses.
  I thank my colleagues in both parties for supporting these 
commonsense reforms.

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