A New Shot At Enlisting The Office Of Management And Budget In Regulatory Streamlining

Congressional leadership on regulatory streamlining is more urgent than ever in the wake of a post-Covid legislative flurry and attendant regulatory pressures soon to be felt alongside already grave budgetary ones. A new proposal led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) called the “Unnecessary Agency Regulations Reduction Act” fits the bill.

The bill would take the sensible steps of “reduc[ing] burdensome government regulations and more efficiently dispos[ing] of outdated, duplicative or unnecessary agency regulations.”

This UARRA legislation would require that OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs critically assess regulations both planned and effective (a task it has abandoned of late). Among much else that assessment would take into account the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) evaluations of unnecessary duplication across the federal government.

OMB would then compile an annual report to Congress on outdated, duplicative, or unnecessary major rules that could be eliminated, thereby giving Congress the raw material it needs to eliminate multiple agency regulations simultaneously via joint resolution.

Read the full article on Forbes.