I’ve signed a law professors’ letter opposing HR 3010, the so-called “Regulatory Accountability Act of 2011.” Even by DC standards, this bill is unusually bad. The following summary, from Regulatory reform good for multinationals, yet bad for you, isn’t actually as alarmist as it sounds:
However, a thorough reading of the RAA leads to three conclusions. First, the bill will likely to dramatically drive up the cost of almost every rule-making process and budget of a federal agency. Second, federally elected officials will be stripped of their ability to responsibly lead our country. And third, the RAA is a highway to never-ending lawsuits by special interests against the federal government.
The RAA is designed to micromanage every federal agency in its efforts to create rules necessary to carry out legislation passed by Congress.
By doing so, it turns over 60 years of effective regulation promulgation under the Administration Procedures Act into a protracted process that will stretch the time needed for rule-making into decades. Federal agency budgets will need to be expanded by hundreds of billions of dollars to comply with the RAA and perform their usual functions of protecting the public and small businesses from unsafe products and practices.
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… the legislation is a corporate lobbyist dream. It appears to have been written by corporate attorneys for corporate attorneys
