AWPA Wireline - June 2004

Regulatory relief for small businesses might be on the way, if some initiatives already begun can move through the Congress and/or Administration in a timely manner.

On the legislative front, a bill - the Paperwork and Regulatory Improvements Act (HR 2432) - recently passed the House of Representatives. It would reduce the burden of paperwork on small businesses by requiring the White House to submit annual reports to Congress on the costs and benefits of federal rules as part of the yearly budget request. It thereby gives Congress the tools it needs to more effectively reduce regulatory and paperwork burdens.

This legislation would give Congress the necessary tools to study and gauge the value of particular regulations and make informed, cost-benefit judgments on their worth. It will lead to paperwork reduction, assist Congress in its review of agency regulatory proposals, and improve public and Congressional understanding of the true costs and benefits of regulations.

The bill also creates a permanent authorization for the General Accounting Office (GAO) to evaluate costs and benefits of rules. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, was given this responsibility in the 2000 Truth in Regulating Act, but never hired staff to carry out the program because it was only authorized for three years.

On another, and more positive, front, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a solicitation for industry input on current rules that would not pass a cost-benefit test. OMB officials will review all the comments received and make determinations on whether some of the more burdensome regulations on the books are not cost-effective.

About 300 suggested changes were sent in by manufacturing groups - including to the Family and Medical Leave Act, chemical labeling, and permits for discharging pollutants.

Not surprisingly, public interest groups are in an uproar over this solicitation. They are calling it a "regulatory hit list" and charge that centering the initiative on manufacturing is an election-year ploy to blame job losses on regulation.

The overall burden of federal paperwork and regulatory requirements is staggering and is an enormous drain on job growth, productivity and American competitiveness. In fact, federal paperwork and regulatory burdens have increased in each of the last 8 years.

In 2001, the Small Business Administration estimated that Americans spent $843 billion complying with federal regulations during the previous year. The OMB estimates the federal paperwork burden on the public to be over 8 billion hours.

Let's take EPA as an example. The paperwork burden for EPA on industry, states and local governments rose from fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2003 - mainly because of measures to tighten requirements on urban and agricultural runoff - from 140.7 million hours in fiscal year 2002 to 147.24 in fiscal year 2003. EPA's phase two stormwater rule, which requires small- and medium-sized cities and owners of small construction sites to take steps to curb runoff containing sediment and other pollutants, imposed more than 4.9 million hours of new paperwork.

In 2003, EPA also dramatically expanded the regulatory program for concentrated animal feeding operations by requiring facilities that use manure as a fertilizer to obtain National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. The new rule increased the EPA paperwork burden by 1.89 million hours.

Another EPA rule that is of interest to wire and wire products manufacturers - its Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) update of commercially used and manufactured chemicals in the US. This measure resulted in an additional 413,577 hours of burden, while a separate regulation getting uniform data from state and local air agencies on compliance with emissions standards resulted in more than 101,000 hours of new paperwork burden.

EPA rules on issues ranging from protecting ground water to curbing toxic emissions from landfills and other major air pollution sources each added tens of thousands of hours to the agency's paperwork burden.