Bush's Regulatory Moratorium

In late August of 1992, OMB Watch and Public Citizen, a citizen watchdog group, released a report charging that President Bush and Vice President Quayle made unsubstantiated claims of "savings" to the economy resulting from the regulatory moratorium originally announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 1992. The report, "Voodoo Accounting: the Toll of President Bush's Regulatory Moratorium," also reveals that dozens of health, safety, consumer, and environment protections were stalled or eliminated as a result of the regulatory freeze.

Bush's moratorium, conveyed to the heads of the federal agencies by memorandum, was essentially a "stop-work" order that brought much of the work of executive branch agencies to a halt by prohibiting them from issuing any new or revised regulation for three months. While the Bush's 90-day moratorium was bad enough, the president went much further by calling for the review of all existing regulations. In fact, the most pernicious component of the Bush moratoruim was that it made the whole universe of health, safety, civil rights, and environmental programs sitting ducks for the over-eager deregulators on the Quayle Council on Competitiveness and in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The report issued by OMB Watch and Public Citizen was initiated after the groups were denied background information about the administration's claims of cost savings resulting from the moratorium. Freedom of Information requests filed with each of the 24 agencies referenced by Bush resulted in responses from 17 agencies, which provided insufficient information to substantiate the president's claims of $10-$20 billion in economic savings from the regulatory moratorium.

The report details 15 cases of delayed, weakened or eliminated regulations in the 120-day extension of the regulatory freeze, which was announced by the president on April 28, 1992.

Casualties of the regulatory freeze include not only rules specifically targeted by the Office of Management and Budget and the Council on Competitiveness, but a host of others that fell victim to the chilling effect the moratorium has had on federal agencies. For example, dozens of EPA rules have been delayed despite the toll the delay is taking on the environment and public health.

After the release of the report, an EPA employee leaked a confidential document that listed at least 76 regulations that were being held up by the White House, many the result of the regulatory moratorium and some in violation of statutory deadlines such as the Clean Air Act.

During the early stages of the 104th Congress, the House followed Bush's example and passed a bill that would have stopped all agency regulatory activity -- even research related to the development of regulations -- for one year. The Senate killed the House bill and substituted an alternative. Because the bills were so vastly different, no House-Senate conference was convened and the moratorium proposal died.