Congressman Jason Smith Capitol Report: SCRUBing Away the D.C. Regulatory Machine
175,268. That is the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations. Across south central and southeast Missouri that number weighs heavy on the backs of small businesses, farmers and families. It also represents a serious problem in Washington: a president circumventing Congress to try and force his rejected policy ideas on the American people.
In 2009, the president failed to get his signature “Cap & Trade” legislation through a Democrat controlled Congress – a policy which would increase the cost of heating homes across the nation. Faced with that failure, the president and the EPA rolled out “Clean Power Plan” regulations in August aimed at bypassing the rejection of Congress to implement Cap & Trade through Executive order. Folks across the 8th Congressional District have told me this regulation alone would make their utility bills triple in cost.
Just this week we saw once again a president intent on going around Congress and against the will of American’s people by pushing forward new ‘Executive Actions’ to try and further restrict 2nd amendment rights.
Outdated and often times conflicting federal regulations, never approved by Congress, are now estimated to impose a nearly $1.86 trillion burden annually on Americans. That’s a cost of roughly $15,000 for every household – higher than the weight of all individual income taxes paid each year to the government. Under the Obama Administration over 24,000 new Federal Rules & Regulations have been finalized, unfortunately the president is now threatening to aggressively grow that list during his final year in office.
This system of burdensome regulations needs to stop. Whether it is in my own business, the state capitol or the halls of Washington, DC, I have been fighting the regulatory machine. This week the House of Representatives took a serious step in regulation reform by passing a bill I authored known as the SCRUB Act – legislation aimed at ‘scrubbing’ the maze of federal regulations of outdated, unnecessary, costly and duplicative rules which conflict with those at the State or Local level, returning power back to the states.
For example Department of Labor should not be telling FFA students in Missouri they can’t do work on the family farm. The National Park Service should not be introducing new regulations restricting the decades old practice of river baptisms on the Current River. The EPA doesn’t need to regulate every drainage ditch, farm, wood stove or even the beautiful clean air of the Mark Twain National Forest. Manufacturers in our district shouldn’t have to close, shed 500 jobs, and move south of the border to Mexico because the cost of complying with over-regulation just becomes too high here in America.
The insanity of the Washington Regulatory Machine needs to stop. This is why my SCRUB Act is so important. It will give the American people the tools to get Washington bureaucrats who have never owned a business or been on a farm off their backs. America’s future with SCRUB in place is one where the regulators have to answer to you, where we finally clean out the cluttered garage of federal red tape and let job creators and producers return focus back to what they know best – growing our economy.
