Background: Tomorrow, the full House Judiciary Committee will be holding a markup of the H.R. 1759, the All Economic Regulations are Transparent Act of 2015 (ALERT Act), sponsored by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.). The House of Representatives considered a similar bill during its last session. (The hearing is also noteworthy, because the committee will be marking up H.R. 427, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2015, or REINS Act. For more information on the REINS Act, see here.)
What the ALERT Act does: The bill would impose a series of new burdensome reporting requirements on agencies and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) regarding the progress and impacts of the agencies’ pending rulemakings. Once a month, agencies would have to provide detailed information about any rules that they are working on, while OIRA would have to issue an annual report detailing the cumulative costs of all rules that have been proposed or finalized during the previous 12 months. Agencies also would be blocked from implementing their final rules for at least six months until after they have published certain information about the rules on the internet.
Why the ALERT Act is bad for the public interest:
The requirements that the bill imposes on agencies would be time-consuming and costly to carry out, wasting scarce agency resources and preventing agencies from carrying out their statutory missions in a timely fashion.
The bill would create less transparency about regulations, by inundating the public with reams of unhelpful data regarding pending regulations and their impacts. Only the most economically powerful could meaningful sift through these data, putting the public and small businesses at a disadvantage.
Because the bill only presents information about regulatory costs—and no information about regulatory benefits—the effect of the bill’s reporting is to mislead the public about the value of pending agency rulemakings. This biased presentation ensures that all regulations—no matter how beneficial to society on balance—appear to be a huge drain on society.
The bill would unnecessarily add a default six-month delay to all agency rulemakings. The rulemaking process already moves too slow, resulting in needless harm to people, the environment, and the economy.
This bill would do nothing to address the biggest transparency problem in the regulatory system: OIRA’s centralized review of regulations.
A detailed analysis on the ALERT Act is available here.
For detailed analyses of legislative attacks against the U.S. regulatory system, see here.
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James Goodwin | April 14, 2015
Background: Tomorrow, the full House Judiciary Committee will be holding a markup of the H.R. 1759, the All Economic Regulations are Transparent Act of 2015 (ALERT Act), sponsored by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.). The House of Representatives considered a similar bill during its last session. (The hearing is also noteworthy, because the committee will be […]
Erin Kesler | April 14, 2015
CPR Scholar and Georgetown University Law School professor William Buzbee testified at a House Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans Oversight hearing today entitled, “Proposed Federal Water Grabs and Their Potential Impacts on States, Water, and Power Users, and Landowners.” The Hearing concerned the EPA and Army Corp of Engineers' proposed "Waters of The US," rule related to water pollution and agriculture. […]
Robert L. Glicksman | April 10, 2015
As climate scientists have been telling us for years, and as all but the most obstinate climate deniers acknowledge, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are contributing to climatic changes. These changes have taken the form of melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, changes in wind and ocean current patterns, and […]
Matt Shudtz | April 9, 2015
Last year, the Center for Progressive Reform published Winning Safer Workplaces: A Manual for State & Local Policy Reform. The manual is intended as a tool for state and local advocates. It highlights successful local campaigns to adopt workplace safety policies, and offers a series of innovative proposals to help state and local advocates […]
Daniel Farber | April 7, 2015
States will only lose out if they refuse to cooperate with the Clean Power Plan. Mitch McConnell has urged states to refuse to submit plans if the Clean Power Plan is upheld by the Court. He has been accused of inciting lawless behavior on the part of state governments. Let me come to his defense on this. (How often […]
Joel A. Mintz | March 31, 2015
When it comes to the size of the federal workforce, most of the rhetoric in Washington revolves around how to cut it. That’s particularly true where Republicans are concerned, and perhaps nowhere truer than with the Environmental Protection Agency, a favorite GOP target. What they almost never mention is that cutting staff means making sacrifices […]
Frank Ackerman | March 30, 2015
There must be a global template for business complaints about regulation, located on some secret right-wing server. Just type in the industry and the name of the regulation: Billions of dollars are at stake, companies will be driven out of the industry and consumers will lose access to low-priced products, if the government dares to […]
Catherine O'Neill | March 26, 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday heard oral argument in the consolidated cases challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule regulating mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants. These utilities remain by far the largest domestic source of mercury emissions, contributing more than half of the mercury releases nationwide. Mercury emissions are at […]
Erin Kesler | March 25, 2015
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Michigan v. EPA. CPR Member Scholar and University of Texas School of Law professor Thomas O. McGarity responded to the debate with the following statement: Following today’s oral arguments, the Supreme Court must decide whether EPA misinterpreted a section in the Clean Air Act requiring it to regulate hazardous […]