Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning on S. 746, the Regulatory Improvement Act of 1999. Before I turn to my substantive remarks, let me briefly sketch the background and experience I bring to the subject.

I am the Director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, the legal arm of Public Citizen, a nationwide advocacy organization with 150,000 members. For more than twenty-five years we have represented consumer groups, labor unions, worker groups, and public health organizations in standard-setting proceedings and in litigation involving the OSHA, EPA, FDA, USDA, NHTSA and other health and safety agencies. Public Citizen is also a member of Citizens for Sensible Safeguards, a broad-based coalition of consumer, environmental, civil rights, labor and health care organizations opposed to legislative proposals that would undermine federal safeguards. I am also currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Public Citizen's extensive, first-hand experience with the regulatory process gives us substantial insight into the way our system now operates. My testimony today addresses the question of how the bill before you -- S. 746 as introduced March 25, 1999 -- would affect basic health, safety, environmental and civil rights protections if it were to become law. It is quite true that this year's bill differs from last year's bill, just as last year's differed from the omnibus regulatory procedure bills introduced in the 104th Congress. But in our view the questions that must be answered about S. 746 of 1999 are not how it replicates or differs from previous years' bills; but rather, how would it change current law, and what would be the real world impact of those changes?

The short answer is that S. 746 would do real harm to public health, safety, environmental and civil rights safeguards. I want to use my time today to present concrete examples of how this bill's "one size fits all" prescriptions would work to block or weaken urgently needed safeguards.

Law of unintended consequences

But first, let me make one point about S. 746 and the law of unintended consequences. The scope of what S. 746 covers is extremely broad but nowhere is it actually defined. While it's understood that the bill would apply to rules to protect the environmental and worker safety, it is not generally known that it would also cover rules to protect nursing home patients from abuse and neglect, or to ensure access to public accommodations for persons with disabilities. Furthermore, we know of no analysis that compares S. 746's prescriptive risk assessment, cost-benefit and net benefits analyses, and peer review provisions with the types of analysis and standards that are currently required by the various statutes to which S. 746 would apply. Are they duplicative? Are they in conflict? Will they actually improve the quality of agency rulemaking, or will they squander already scarce agency resources?

We are not alone in noting the absence of this information. In a July 31, 1998, letter to OMB Director Jack Lew, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, Minority Whip David Bonier, and the Ranking Minority Members of the House Committees with jurisdiction over regulatory agencies asked those same questions. (Letter and questions attached) It is our understanding that, to date, they have not been answered. The greater the unknowns, the more likely that a such a sweeping change in law as S. 746 requires will result in significant unintended consequences.

Regulatory Obstacle Course

S. 746 would change current law by imposing highly prescriptive risk assessment, cost-benefit analyses, net benefits determination, and peer review mandates on the health, safety, environmental protection and civil rights regulatory process. The real world impact would do serious damage to the ability of federal agencies to protect public health, safety, the environment, and civil rights. S. 746's "one size fits all" prescriptions would:

1. Add months if not years of delay to an already torturously slow process -- it takes OSHA and EPA on average ten years to issue a major rule;
2. Tilt the playing field to an even greater degree than is already the case toward less protective safeguards in order to lower industry compliance costs;
3. Make the regulatory process less democratic and less transparent than it is at present;
4. Create new grounds for industry opponents to successfully challenge public safeguards in court.

What, you ask, has the agency done in the face of a health threat of this magnitude? To date, the answer is nothing. My clients, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and Public Citizen Health Research Group, filed a rulemaking petition with OSHA in 1993 asking the agency to address the health threat posed to workers by hexavalant chromium. Since that time, OSHA has repeatedly acknowledged the gravity of the risk workers are facing, and has pledged to address it swiftly as it can. But the agency, after six years, is still probably at least a year away from publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking. Meanwhile, 200,000 American workers are paying for this regulatory paralysis with their health and well-being.

Instead of tackling the problems of agency paralysis -- which puts millions of Americans at risk, just like the 200,000 workers exposed to hexavalant chromium -- S. 746 adds to it. Not only is S. 746 highly prescriptive in terms of the risk assessment and cost benefit analysis it requires, slowing and complicating the agencies' preparation of those documents; but S. 746 also mandates cumbersome peer review procedures that will give industry a preferred place in the rulemaking and shut the public out, and it expands the scope of judicial review to give industry new weapons to challenge agency rules.

Let me explain in greater detail how the "regulatory obstacle course" S. 746 would erect would work in practice.

Risk Assessment

S. 746 for the first time imposes a statutory requirement on agencies to conduct risk assessments according to its detailed prescription for every major rule [i.e., one with annual costs of more than $100 million] "the primary purpose of which is to address health, safety or environmental risk." S. 746's prescriptive steps must also be followed for risk assessments unrelated to regulation that are identified by OMB as likely to have a cost impact of $100 million or more annually. Section 624(a)(1)(A).

This is an extraordinarily broad requirement. Agencies will be compelled to perform risk assessments even when the risks are perfectly apparent, as they are with foodborne toxins such as salmonella, listeria, and E. coli 0157. There is no comparable provision in Executive Order 12866, nor have some health and safety agencies routinely prepared risk assessments in the past. For example, although the economic impact of the FDA tobacco rule exceeds the $100 million annual threshold, no formal risk assessment was prepared to support it, although one would be required by S. 746.

Food safety protections are an ideal case study to explain why S. 746's risk assessment mandate would be so damaging. In the last years, we have become all too aware of the deadly risk which microbial pathogens like E. coli 0157, listeria, salmonella enteritidis, and cryptosporidia pose to the safety of our nation's food supply. In 1993, after the tragic deaths of children caused by E. coli 0157 in Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers, USDA initiated rulemaking to modernize the century old "poke and sniff" meat inspection system. That resulted in the 1996 Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) rule, a performance-based system that relies on microbial testing to verify the effectiveness of a meat and poultry plant's pathogen reduction plan. Deaths and serious illness from microbial pathogens have also been linked to lettuce, fresh fruit, processed luncheon meats, hot dogs, and shellfish. USDA and FDA are currently exploring how best to protect the public.

Had S. 746 been in effect, USDA could not have initiated the HACCP rule, or, at best, would have been severely hampered by it. That is because no risk assessment of the sort prescribed by the bill was conducted, or could have been conducted. Data to demonstrate and measure risk of foodborne illness that would satisfy S. 746's prescriptive methodology were not, and still are not, available. So even though the public danger was clear and the need for protection urgent, S. 746 would have required USDA to devote months and perhaps years to collecting and analyzing data proving the obvious before doing anything else. If S. 746 becomes law, its risk assessment mandate will block USDA and FDA in the future from acting swiftly to prevent foodborne illness from microbial pathogens in fresh fruit and produce or prepared meats.

S. 746's "one size fits all" risk assessment mandate doesn't "fit" food safety. That is not because USDA and FDA rules are not science based. To the contrary, the HACCP system was developed by the National Academy of Sciences; numerous scientific studies underlie the agencies' food safety work. The agencies are developing a process risk model of risk assessment to identify the points in the farm-to-table continuum where the risk of contamination is the greatest. When it comes to protecting the nation's food supply, S. 746 is bad science: It mandates the wrong risk assessment model be used for the wrong purpose at the wrong time.

There are three other problems with the S. 746 risk assessment provision. First, the bill requires years of work to take place even before the publication of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which, under the APA, is the first formal step in the rulemaking process. Under the bill, risk assessment has to be done very early in the pre-NPRM process, both to allow for peer review that Section 625(h) says shall occur before the NPRM, and because the agency cannot publish a NPRM without at least a preliminary risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. See Section 623. Indeed, Section 623(b)(2)(C) requires the initial cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the results of the risk assessment. As a result, agencies will have no choice but to restructure their work. Agencies will first have to prepare, with peer review oversight and public input, their risk assessment. Then the agency will have to conduct at least a preliminary cost-benefit analysis. And all of this work -- which could take years to complete -- must be done even prior to the publication of the NPRM, because Section 623 requires the initial regulatory analysis to include both documents. Had S. 746's requirements been in place when the Agriculture Department was trying to cope with outbreaks of E. coli 0157, it would have crippled the Department’s ability to respond.

Second, the risk assessment provision establishes hurdles the agencies cannot possibly overcome. In two separate provisions, agencies are directed to consider all relevant, reasonably available and reliable information. One provision, Section 624(e), instructs the agency to consider all such information in preparing each risk assessment. The second provision, Section 624(c)(2), directs agencies to consider all such information in making the scientific assumptions that underlie the agency's risk assessment. Simply to describe the task these provisions direct the agencies to tackle demonstrates that it is undoable. Nor does this requirement make sense. Assume for the moment that there are fifty basic treatises on risk assessment. Is it really Congress's intention to require the agency to consider each treatise, even though, in the language of Section 624(c)(2), they plainly are "reasonably available, relevant and reliable"? What about the FDA's tobacco rule? Does Congress seriously intend to saddle the FDA with reviewing every available and conceivably relevant study to determine whether it is reliable so that the agency can assess the risks of smoking? This requirement guarantees regulatory paralysis. Ask yourself this question: Could Congress function if it were subject to the same mandate as a precondition to legislating? I have my doubts.

Third, although risk assessments have been subjected to judicial review in the past, nothing in the APA specifically directs reviewing courts to examine the risk assessment, as S. 746 would require. As discussed more fully below, S. 746 marks a substantial change which will almost certainly intensify judicial review of risk assessments, and one that will inevitably force agencies to put more time and effort into polishing their risk assessment than they do now -- as will the bill's prescription that risk assessment studies be peer reviewed, and that agencies respond in writing to written comments by peer reviewers.

Cost-benefit analysis and net benefit determination

We recognize that most agencies have been required to perform cost-benefit analyses for significant rules for quite some time. But until now, the cost-benefit analyses played a specific and highly limited role. They are prepared to ensure that agencies achieve their regulatory objectives with due regard for cost and in the most economically efficient way possible consistent with their statutory mandates. Cost-benefit analyses are available for public and OMB review, and are the subject of probing, on-the-record dialogue between the agency and regulated parties. But, by and large, they are not subject to judicial review, especially for those agencies -- like the health and safety agencies -- that operate under statutes that foreclose reliance on cost-benefit considerations in standard setting.

S. 746 topples that understanding. To begin with, S. 746 sets highly detailed and prescriptive requirements for cost-benefit analyses and mandates inquiries agencies do not at present ordinarily undertake. For instance, what purpose is served by requiring OSHA to evaluate numerous options forbidden to it by statute, such as the option of doing nothing, as Section 623(b)(2)(A)(iv)(I) requires? And why should OSHA evaluate "a range of regulatory options," when its statute gives the agency an unequivocal mandate to worry first and foremost about worker protection, not about lower-cost but less protective options?

Moreover, S. 746 requires that an agency do one of two things before promulgating a final rule: (1) Certify that its rule optimizes economic efficiency by achieving "the rule making objective in a more cost–effective manner, or with greater net benefits, than the other reasonable alternatives considered by the agency," see Section 623(d)(1)(A), or (2) justify why it failed to impose what S. 746's methodology determines to be the single most economically rational option. We believe that the premise embodied in S. 746 – that there is a single rulemaking course that is economically optimal – is nothing but a chimera.

But the real vice of S. 746 is that it will rightly be seen by agencies as a mandate to put considerations of economic efficiency first, even when the agency's organic statute dictates otherwise. To put it bluntly, the take home message of S. 746 to agencies is to optimize the economic benefits of the regulation relative to costs. But many agencies are forbidden from doing that. OSHA, for example, is instructed by section 6(b)(5) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, to set the most protective standard feasible, limited only by technological feasibility (is compliance technically possible?) and economic feasibility (are the compliance costs so high that they will result in significant economic dislocation for the industry as a whole?). Put another way, OSHA is not permitted to say, for instance, that $100 million is too much to spend to save fifty workers' lives, so long as there is an available solution that is technologically feasible and that would not cause the industry serious economic dislocation. OSHA must impose the $100 million standard, even if a $50 million standard would save forty of those lives. Forcing OSHA to address these less protective (and legally foreclosed) options does not enhance the quality of the agency's decision-making -- it only dissipates scarce agency resources.

S. 746 says that it does not change or modify Congress' instruction to OSHA. Section 622. That literally is correct. Under S. 746, OSHA theoretically remains free to select the more protective rule, provided that it explains that the more expensive rule is required by the OSH Act and puts its analysis of the lower cost option in the record.

But there are two problems with this scenario. First, it is far from clear that the hydraulic pressure imposed on the agency by S. 746 to moderate its rule to achieve lower costs will be resistible by regulators. If you were an OSHA Administrator confronted with the choice I've just outlined, which route would you take? S. 746 and the OSH Act give an OSHA Administrator two diametrically opposed messages -- the OSH Act says protect workers at virtually any cost; S. 746 says, whatever you do, make sure you place economic optimality above all other values. These are contradictory messages that simply cannot be reconciled and S. 746 will push agencies towards saving money, not lives.

Second, even if the net benefits test, standing alone, does not push agencies towards less protective rules, when its impact is combined with peer review intervention and the looming presence of judicial review, agencies will face enormous pressure to go in the direction of economic efficiency -- even at the expense of the public protections.

Peer Review

S. 746 calls for peer review of risk assessments prepared in support of a major rule or as ordered by OMB and of cost-benefit analyses for rules with more than $500 million in annual costs. Section 625. This provision is a misnomer. As commonly understood, the purpose of peer review is to bring neutral, disinterested expertise to bear on a scientific or technical issue. But S. 746 really provides for "partisan review," because it assumes that parties with a direct stake in the outcome of the rulemaking will participate in the peer review process.

The potential for self-interested members of peer review panels to abuse their positions is made all the more severe because the panels are permitted to operate in secret, closed-door sessions, with no public oversight of the process. Astonishingly, panels are permitted to meet in secret, keep no minutes, and keep their deliberations from public view. There is no requirement that the panels represent competing points of view; indeed, the only "balance" that is required is that panel reports must contain a "balanced" presentation of the issues. How an unbalanced panel will issue balanced reports is not addressed by the bill. Making matters worse, it is a virtual certainty that the panels will be not be broadly representative, no matter what the statute says. The reality is that the only stakeholder in the regulatory process that can afford to sponsor panel members is big business. Labor unions, environmental and civil rights organizations, and public interest groups do not have staffs of scientists or economists who can take time out from their work schedules to participate in these panels. Nor do they have the financial wherewithal to hire these experts or to sponsor them in academia, as the regulated industry is able to do. And, for no reason that is apparent, agency experts are excluded, despite the knowledge and technical competence they could add to the peer review committee's deliberations.

We are also troubled by the language in section 625(b)(1)(E) that allows peer review panels to review secret submissions, subject to confidentiality agreements. Giving peer review panels access to information denied to the public confirms our point that these panels have a preferred place at the rulemaking table, and will be able to exert influence on the rulemaking far beyond the ability of other citizens. Moreover, the idea that the agency will consider information that is off-limits to the general public in preparing key regulatory documents is a strange one, which, insofar as we are aware, has no clear anchor in existing law. The statutes that define what constitutes rulemaking records to do not contemplate portions of the record being fenced-off from the public. And to the extent that agency personnel have access to such information, it ought to be closely held and not shared with peer reviewers, particularly those with a financial stake in the outcome of the rule. That would again provide an enormous advantage to the preferred few that participate in the peer review process.

We disagree with the defense of this provision raised in some quarters, namely that this is a benign process for the agency to receive expert assistance on highly technical matters in a systematic way. There are two problems with this justification. First, it overlooks that the APA itself establishes that system through the requirement of notice and comment rulemaking. Any suggestion that the current system does not afford interested parties the opportunity to offer their expert views on agency risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses is nonsense. Second, it ignores the fact that the peer review provision does not construct a one-way street, with information flowing only to the agency. To the contrary, the agency is required to respond, in writing, to significant peer review comments, giving peer review panel members enormous leverage in the rulemaking process. It is counter to basic democratic principles to empower a select few to be given a privileged place in the rulemaking process, but, make no mistake, that is precisely what this provision does.

The final problem with the peer review mandate in S. 746 is time and money. This process will be extremely time-consuming -- and tens of thousands of dollars per panel will be diverted from other important priorities. For agencies already cash-starved by budget reductions, having to bear this burden will sap their ability to do their work. Congress should not impose this "unfunded mandate" on the agencies.

Expansion of OMB authority and secrecy

S. 746 represents a capitulation by Congress on an issue that has provoked considerable passion in the past -- namely, should the President be given authority to review agency rules? Whatever the merits of presidential assertions of power to review agency rules, it is quite another thing for Congress to surrender that power to the President. S. 746 does just that. It directs the President to "establish a process for the review and coordination of Federal regulatory actions," see Section 632(b), and to assign the task of reviewing federal regulatory actions to the Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB. Finally, S. 746 dictates, at least in outline form, the procedures OMB must employ in reviewing rules. We are surprised that Congress would endorse this view, particularly given the opposition of many in Congress to centralized Presidential review and the efforts Congress has taken in the past to circumscribe OMB's power.

But apart from our disagreement about the wisdom of centralized OMB review, there are serious problems with S. 746. Foremost among them is that the procedural rules it dictates are less transparent and accountable than those that exist under Executive Order 12866. For example, OMB would no longer have to put in writing why it is disapproving an agency rule. Agencies would no longer have to log "substantive" messages received from non-governmental entities regarding rules under review; only "significant" meetings and calls would have to be logged. The bill also reverses changes made by the Clinton Administration to establish a fixed 90-day OMB review period, with the possibility of one 30-day extension if requested jointly by both the Agency Director and the OMB Director. Under S. 746, OMB would be able unilaterally to extend its review of rules indefinitely. Section 632(d)(2). Given the abuses that have taken place in the past, where OMB literally held important rules hostage until agencies relented and made changes OMB wanted, Congress should outlaw this practice, not bless it.

We understand that nothing in S. 746 would forbid an enlightened Administration from adopting procedures that provide for greater accountability and transparency. But our experience with OMB has shown that not all Administrations share the view that OMB's review process should be an open one. If Congress chooses to legislate in this area, it ought to do so with the understanding that the procedural safeguards it prescribes guarantee full OMB accountability to the public.

Judicial Review

The judicial review provision of S. 746 is bound to cause serious mischief in the courts, and will force agencies to regulate defensively, generally by doing less rather than more. There are no fewer than four serious problems with this provision.

First, like any provision of a statute, the judicial review provision will not be read in isolation. Rather, it will be read in context. Courts will try to understand the purpose of the Act in determining the scope and intensity of judicial review. In so doing, they will get what is, at best, a mixed message. For although S. 746 professes that it is not intended to displace the decisional standards set in the agency's organic statutes that generally look only to maximizing public protection, S. 746 sends a diametrically opposed message to agencies -- maximize economic efficiency. That message will not be lost on reviewing courts.

Second, S. 746 directs the courts to review the agency's risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses. Although risk assessments have always been made part of the record on judicial review, that is not true of cost-benefit analyses; under the Executive Orders, they have not been part of the judicial review record. Again, Congress' explicit direction that the cost-benefit analysis must be considered by the reviewing court is significant; it too sends a message that Congress wants the courts to ensure that the final rule is economically efficient.

Third, S. 746 directs a reviewing court to consider the agency's "net benefits" test. This provision is the most telling of all. The function of the net benefits test is to force the agency to identify one rulemaking option that is the most economically efficient in achieving the agency's rulemaking objectives. Where an agency fails to select that option, it is required to explain its reasons and to "describe any reasonable alternative considered by the agency that would be likely to provide benefits that justify the costs of the rule and be likely to substantially achieve the rule making objective in a more cost-effective manner, or with greater net benefits, than the alternative selected by the agency." This requirement places the agency in a highly vulnerable position in a judicial review proceeding. Regardless of what the agency's underlying mandate dictates, the court will measure the agency's rulemaking choice against S. 746's net benefits test and the more cost-effective option the agency must describe. That is a prescription for judicial invalidation of the agency's rule.

Finally, S. 746 raises the specter of agency rules being set aside or remanded because the agency failed to perform its cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, or net benefits analysis in the manner prescribed by Act. This is a serious problem that marks a significant change from prior versions of the bill. In a nutshell, the problem is this. The Act sets up highly prescriptive standards for conducting cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments; it also spells out in detail precisely how an agency must conduct its net benefits test. Section 627(e) says that "[i]f an agency fails to perform" these analyses, the rule may be set aside or remanded. To be sure, a court could read the language in Section 627(e) to apply only when an agency made no pretense of performing these functions. But that is not what the Act now says. There is no qualifier like "completely" or "entirely" to signal to a reviewing court that that is the sort of failure Congress sought to guard against. Moreover, courts will recognize that agencies are not likely to shirk these responsibilities entirely. Rather, courts are likely to measure whether an agency has "perform[ed]" these analyses against the yardsticks established in the statute. If the agency has not followed the statute to the letter, a court might well rule that it has not "perform[ed]" the required analysis and set aside the rule on that basis alone. That could have disastrous consequences for the agency.

Let me end my discussion of the pitfalls of the judicial review provision in S. 746 by illustrating how it creates a Catch-22 situation for health and safety agencies. Imagine that you are a conscientious administrator who is attempting to be faithful to the Clean Air Act's mandate to require maximum achievable control technology to reduce airborne toxins. Under S. 746, you will have conducted cost-benefit analyses of a range of regulatory options, and made a determination that one single option is the most cost-effective or shows the greatest "net benefits." That will undoubtedly be an option that provides less protection that the Clean Air Act, read by itself, would require. Here's your dilemma:

If you make the determination that the most protective option is the one with the greatest net benefits, the rule may be overturned as arbitrary and capricious because the record does not contain sufficient data and evidence to prove that case under the "one size fits all" cost-benefit tests of S. 746.

But if you determine that the most protective option fails the net benefits test, and then choose it anyway on the grounds that the Clean Air Act so requires, the rule may be overturned because a court finds that explanation unreasonable. After all, you have just made a record that there is another option that is more cost-effective, or shows greater net benefits.

Either way you go, the more protective rule will be in legal jeopardy. And making a record that you have chosen a regulatory option that is not the most cost-effective would also, of course, put the rule in substantial political jeopardy in terms of OMB and congressional oversight.

The problem is the spotlight S. 746 focuses on risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses and its emphasis on economic concerns over humanistic values. Despite its carefully couched text, the one message that trumps all others in S. 746 is that Congress wants regulators to put cost concerns on the front burner. Even though Section 622 of S. 746 tells courts that it does not supplant the substantive standards and the range of regulatory options the agency has the authority to adopt under the underlying statute, courts must seek to effectuate its provisions as well as other provisions of law. A court could reach the common-sense conclusion that Congress did not want the economic analytical requirements of S. 746 to be an empty gesture and see S. 746 as a message from Congress to insist on a far higher degree of economic justification for regulatory choices than was the rule in the past.

Comparative risk analysis/standardization of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis

Section 624(g) directs agencies to engage in comparative risk analysis, that is, to compare the risk the agency is seeking to regulate with estimates of human risk that are familiar to and routinely encountered by the general public, and to discuss this comparison in its risk assessment. Comparative risk analysis is a highly controversial technique; this is a mandate to compare risks that are as dissimilar as apples and oranges. Section 630(a)(3) contemplates using comparative risk analysis for government and agency priority setting. This is particularly unjustified, since it can actually skew the setting of priorities in an irrational way. Risks that are easily quantified automatically go to the head of the list, while other risks -- that may be far more serious, but for which the data are lacking -- languish at the bottom. That is not rational priority setting. And it is unwise to enshrine a emerging, nascent technique like comparative risk assessment into law, especially given the enormous uncertainties that plague the underlying data.

Section 628 lays out a timeline for OMB, the Council on Economic Advisors, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to move toward standardizing agency cost-benefit and risk assessment activities. We do not believe that standardization is appropriate for either risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis. Risk assessment is a relatively young science; the methodologies under development at USDA in the "farm to table" food safety initiative serve different purposes, and thus vary significantly, from an EPA risk analysis of environmental toxins. OSHA and EPA use different methodologies in conducting risk assessment to regulate carcinogens, because the groups they are charged with protecting vary so widely. To suggest, as does S. 746, that the time has come to make risk assessments "consistent" is to ignore the fact that agencies have profoundly different missions.

Conclusion

My testimony today has used real world examples of real world harm that would reasonably and predictably result if S. 746 were to become law. Based both on the known damage the bill would do, and the likelihood of major unintended consequences from what is not known, we believe Congress and this Committee should reject this legislation. Nothing in this bill solves the real problems our regulatory system faces by streamlining the administrative process in a way that unshackles the agencies; nothing helps agencies fill the gaps that threaten our safety net of protections. These are the real problems which Congress and this Committee ought to address.

Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

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