CEI Offers Reform Ideas to Congress Aimed at Fostering Resilience and Promoting Economic Renewal
Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) offered a set of policy reform goals for the 117th Congress focused on economic stimulus and regulatory reform. The report, Free to Prosper: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 117th Congress, identifies ways for Congress to respond to some of the greatest challenges we’ve faced in a generation. Pandemic hardships throughout the past year have exposed dysfunctional government institutions and outdated policies.
Free to Prosper offers economic policy proposals and ideas that will aid economic recovery and impose more government transparency and accountability.
“The power of lowering government barriers to economic activity can be seen everywhere from telework to multiple coronavirus vaccines to millions of small businesses finding new ways to thrive when regulations that were never needed are relaxed and repealed,” said Kent Lassman, CEI president. “The policies enacted in the coming two years can put America on a path toward greater resilience and fuel a durable economic renewal.”
CEI’s congressional agenda offers nine policy areas to reform, along with a set of specific reforms for each (one example for each policy area listed below).
- Regulatory Reform – Impose automatic 10-year sunsets on new federal regulations and enact a law requiring Congress to vote on major regulations before they become effective.
- Medical Technology and Health Care – Permanently repeal federal rules that hinder or forbid telemedicine and promote real price transparency by giving patients more responsibility for health care choices.
- Technology and Telecommunications – Protect Internet freedom—which has proved crucial for helping people stay connected during the pandemic—against burdensome “net neutrality” mandates, protect consumer privacy, and end unnecessary media ownership restrictions.
- Energy and Environment – Reject the Green New Deal and similar central planning schemes, oppose carbon taxes, and end federal energy tax credits.
- Banking and Finance – Make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accountable to Congress, oppose regulatory overreach, allow financial service providers to offer consumers new services, and allow banks and credit unions to serve legal marijuana businesses.
- Food, Drugs, and Consumer Freedom – Protect consumers’ access to tobacco substitutes and remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act.
- Labor and employment – Reform the outdated Fair Labor Standards Act, oppose the PRO Act, and enable voluntary union membership.
- Trade – Repeal the legacy tariffs and promote free trade policies.
- Transportation – Appoint a commission tasked with suggesting changes to federal transportation policies that waste resources on underused infrastructure like mass transit at the expense of bigger priorities.
View the report, Free to Prosper: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 117th Congress, on cei.org.