Tipton Fights to Reduce Red Tape, Encourage Small Business Growth

WASHINGTON—Underscoring that excess regulation impacts small businesses’ ability to create jobs and grow the economy, Congressman Scott Tipton (R-CO), today, voted to pass legislation to provide additional review and scrutiny in the regulatory process.

The passage of the All Economic Regulations are Transparent Act (H.R. 2804) follows Tipton’s tour of small businesses in Grand Junction last week where he met with employers to discuss the impact of regulation and ways to improve the regulatory process to foster a healthy economy.

There are currently 174,545 pages of federal regulations that cost the U.S. economy approximately $1.8 trillion annually. Despite these staggering figures, by the end of 2013 the Administration had over 4,000 new regulations coming down the pipeline.

“Small business owners in my district consistently tell me that overregulation is among the top challenges they face in creating jobs and growing their businesses. When federal agencies implement costly and burdensome regulations at whim and fail to update outdated and duplicative rules, the economy suffers, jobs are lost, and Americans lose their competitive edge in the global marketplace,” said Tipton. “While many regulations are vital for a safe and fair marketplace, the type of overregulation we are seeing now has strayed from those ends and only serves to grow bureaucracy, rather than foster a healthy economy. Today’s legislation would help restore some commonsense to the regulatory process by increasing transparency and ensuring a more thorough review of proposed and existing rules, taking into greater consideration their impact on the economy.”

H.R. 2804 would:

• Ensure more thorough review of proposed rules by requiring agencies to fully comply with the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, eliminating loopholes agencies use to avoid the regulatory review process.
• Give businesses greater certainty of the rules being put forward by the Administration by requiring agencies to provide proper notice and detailed information about forthcoming regulations every month.

Prior to passage of the H.R. 2804, Tipton amended the bill (Title III, The Improvements to the Regulatory Flexibility Act) to clarify that each federal agency must publish a list of existing regulations for review annually. See the amendment here.

Tipton spoke in support of his amendment on the House floor.

Watch video of Tipton’s floor statement here.

The transcript of Tipton’s statement as prepared for delivery follows:

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of my amendment to Title III, the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act, which will ensure that a requirement under the current law — the Regulatory Flexibility Act or RFA — remains intact. 

As the 1970s came to a close, Congress took note of the challenges that small businesses were facing.  They were struggling to run their businesses while complying with an increasing number of complicated regulations.   This led to the passage of the Regulatory Flexibility Act in 1980, which was designed to improve agency rulemaking. Under the statute, federal government agencies looking to regulate the private sector must evaluate the costs of doing so on small businesses, and, where the costs are found to be significant, seek less burdensome alternatives to their proposed actions.

A key piece of the RFA is Section 610, the “look-back” provision, which requires agencies to periodically evaluate the necessity of every existing regulation that has a “significant” economic impact on a substantial number of small businesses and determine whether those regulations should be amended or rescinded to minimize burdens on small businesses.  As part of the Section 610 review process, agencies must annually publish the list of regulations they plan to review in the Federal Register.  This amendment makes a technical correction to the text of Title III to ensure this current annual publication requirement remains in place.

It is an entirely appropriate exercise for agencies to review old regulations and weed out ones that are outdated, ineffective or overly burdensome. Ten years is a lifetime in terms of our private sector’s ability to radically transform marketplaces. Reviewing the actual impacts of existing regulations every ten years just makes sense.  Understanding the real-world consequences of a regulation on small businesses and taking into account changes in other areas of federal, state, or local law that may affect the necessity of the regulation are just a few reasons that make these reviews absolutely essential.

The regulatory burden for small business has not lightened since the passage of the RFA, either. In fact, agencies have been so busy issuing new regulations that they have sometimes failed to comply with the already existing requirement to annually publish their lists of regulations to be reviewed and review them. This simply isn’t acceptable. This amendment will relieve federal agencies of any ambiguity as to whether or not this annual publication requirement still exists and ensure that small businesses can continue to make their voices heard after a regulation has been implemented.