Sec. 503. Policy statement on Federal regulatory budgeting and reform
367 words·~2 min read·
/bill/115/hconres/71/rh/section-503·A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
The House finds the following: Federal regulations are estimated to cost $1.9 trillion per year or approximately $15,000 per household. Such costs exceed 10 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States. Excessive Federal regulation— retards job creation, investment, wages, competition, and economic growth, slowing the Nation’s recovery from economic recession and harming American households; operates as a regressive tax on poor and lower-income households; displaces workers into long-term unemployment or lower-paying jobs; adversely affects small businesses, the primary source of new jobs; and impedes the economic growth necessary to provide sufficient funds to meet vital commitments and reduce the Federal debt.
Federal agencies do not systematically analyze both the costs and benefits of new regulations or identify and eliminate, minimize, or mitigate excess regulatory costs through post-implementation assessments of their regulations. Agencies too often impose costly regulations without relying on sound science, through the use of agency guidance, judicial consent decrees, and settlement agreements, and through the abuse of high interim compliance costs imposed on regulated entities that bring legal challenges against newly promulgated regulations.
Congress lacks an effective mechanism to manage the level of new Federal regulatory costs imposed each year. Other nations, meanwhile, have successfully implemented the use of regulatory budgeting to control excess regulation and regulatory costs. Significant steps have been taken already by President Trump and the 115th Congress, including the imposition of a regulatory pay-as-you-go regimen for new and revised regulations by the Trump Administration and the enactment of 14 measures under the Congressional Review Act that repealed regulations promulgated in the final 60 legislative days of the 114th Congress.
It is the policy of this concurrent resolution that the House should, in consultation with the public, consider legislation that— requires the President’s budget submission to include an analysis of the costs of complying with current and proposed regulations; builds the institutional capacity of the Congressional Budget Office to develop a regulatory baseline and estimate regulatory costs; codifies the Trump Administration’s regulatory pay-as-you-go requirements, which require agencies to offset the costs of new or revised regulations with the repeal or modification of existing regulations; and requires Federal agencies to give notice and allow for comments on proposed guidance documents.