President Barack Obama on Tuesday pushed back against GOP charges that he is saddling the nation with costly and overly burdensome regulations. In fact, Obama argued, he has led the way in trying to reduce the federal government’s regulatory costs on individuals and businesses across the country.
In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Obama said his efforts to reduce the government’s regulatory burden will save $10 billion over the next five years, adding that he hopes to find billions more in additional savings. Earlier this year, Obama issued an executive order imposing a series of requirements designed to reduce burdens and costs and called for a government-wide review of rules now on the books.
“A mere fraction of the initiatives described in the plans will save more than $10 billion over the next five years,” Obama wrote. “As progress continues, we expect to be able to deliver savings far in excess of that figure.”
But Boehner has taken issue with the net impact of Obama’s anti-regulatory push, arguing that the administration has at least 219 planned regulations in the works.
“I was startled to learn that the EPA estimates that at least one of its proposed rules will cost our economy as much as $90 billion per year,” Boehner wrote Obama in a letter late last week. “The administration has not disclosed how many of the other 218 planned rules will cost more than $1 billion, nor identified these rules.”
Boehner’s letter also asked the administration to provide Congress with a list of all newly proposed regulations with a projected economic impact of at least $1 billion.
“This information is of great relevance to the American people, who face so much uncertainty about these new regulatory costs,” Boehner wrote.
After highlighting his efforts to ease government regulations, Obama listed seven new regulations that would each cost the U.S. economy more than $1 billion a year, but cautioned that they were still under review and he and his staff will “give careful consideration” to cost-savings.
Of the seven, Obama said, four are proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules and three are Department of Transportation rules. The proposed EPA regulation to which Boehner referred is a pending air-quality standard decision.
During the Bush administration, the EPA’s decision to lower the ozone standard faced severe criticism from environmentalists and liberal activists who argued the weaker regulation would pose a risk to human health. Last year the EPA said it would revisit the issue, but the Obama administration has already missed multiple deadlines to change the standard, and amid an ongoing economic crisis, faces intense pressure from business organizations to leave it alone — at least for now.
The EPA has tried to offset the costs of the stricter ozone standard by offering other, more incremental rule changes aimed at saving money, including more dependence on electronic communications rather than paper, which would save roughly $126 million each year.
Get the day’s best political analysis, news and reporting from the TPM team delivered to your inbox every day with DayBreaker. Sign up here, it takes just a few seconds.
