Time to Cut Some Red Tape

  "The federal government is too big and too expensive.  That's a constant refrain I hear as I visit businesses large and small, community groups, and economic development meetings across the Eighth Congressional District. 

I've often used this opportunity to communicate the sheer magnitude of our $13.8 trillion federal debt and our upcoming $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit.  (If the federal debt was a stack of $100 bills, that stack would cover a football field and reach about 10 stories high.)  But there is another side to our massive government: the incredible amount of regulation of and intervention into the lives of ordinary Americans.

Here is an example: one of the first official acts of Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to establish a new committee of the U.S. House of Representatives called the Select Committee on Climate Change.  This committee has spent $8 million in taxpayer funds over four years to conduct "fact-finding" missions.  Despite the law which states that the committee has no legislative role, it has spent millions to write reports making the case for global warming and backing cap-and-trade legislation which would destroy jobs here in the Eighth Congressional District and throughout the Heartland. 

But the costs of this environmental agenda in Congress pale in comparison to the costs undertaken by the executive branch.  Millions of dollars are already being spent by the Obama Administration's Environmental Protection Agency to concoct a web of rules and regulations to restrict commerce, punish consumers of electricity and fuel with surcharges and taxes, and limit the use of alternative energy resources.

Growing our economy and creating jobs are worthy goals, and they are incompatible with the regulatory nightmare being implemented at the EPA.  Aside from its efforts to regulate emissions in the name of stopping global climate change, that agency is smothering our economy with other new rules. 

The EPA is regulating the cooling water intake systems for power plants - at a cost of $300 million per coal plant to $1 billion per nuclear plant.  That's nearly 500 power plants nationwide, and these regulations would cause many facilities to simply shut down rather than face the crippling compliance costs.

EPA coal ash regulations could cost more than $20 billion and tens of thousands of jobs, having an especially acute effect on coal-reliant states like Missouri.

And new regulations on industrial and commercial boilers would put three quarters of a million jobs at risk. 

This is just a sampling of the economic damage caused by one agency in the first two years of a single presidential administration.  Congress has a responsibility and an obligation to conduct oversight of executive agencies like the EPA, but instead they are getting a free pass from Speaker Pelosi and other congressional leaders.  The regulations produced by this administration need a serious dose of sunlight."