Posts Tagged ‘congressional hearing’

Wayne Crews

Runaway Spending and Deficits–Plus Runaway Regulation

by Wayne Crews
Today, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial and Administrative Law will conduct a hearing on “Cost-Justifying Regulations: Protecting Jobs and the Economy by Presidential and Judicial Review of Costs and Benefits.”

These hearings are long overdue. Runaway regulation is now nipping at the the heels of runaway spending and deficits. The Dodd-Frank financial legislation alone has already, as of April, generated 3.3 million words of regulation in 3,500 Federal Register pages, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the translation of law-to-rules there has barely begun.

A much-cited evaluation of the United States federal regulatory enterprise for the Small Business Administration finds annual regulatory compliance costs hit $1.75 trillion. (Criticisms of this report have emerged; but for starters let’s recognize that estimated costs of Sarbanes-Oxley alone–the post-Enron but pre-Dodd Frank financial law–top $1 trillion.)

The expanding scope of federal regulations is newly explored in the 2011 edition of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. (The report also has been circulated this week as a Dear Colleague letter by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)).

Of note:

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Posted May 4th 2011 at 6:47 am in Congress, Economics, Regulation | 38 Comments

Jed Babbin

Waxman Cancels Healthcare Show Trial

by Jed Babbin

Health insurance company CEOs will apparently be spared the public thrashing planned for April 21 by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Hollywood). Waxman notified committee members of the cancellation in a memo released Wednesday.

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The memo implies that the companies which had been asked to appear – Verizon, Caterpillar, AT&T and Deere & Co. – were being less critical of the new healthcare law, but there is nothing to support that implication.

The memo says that, “…several companies and their representatives expressed the view that the new law could have beneficial impacts on large employers if implemented properly.”  But the memo appears to back away from the accusatory letters and press releases which preceded it.

The hearing – the sort of public lashing that the Energy and Commerce Committee became famous for under Waxman’s predecessor, John Dingell (D-Mi) – was called because Waxman wanted to bash the companies for making (legally-required) financial disclosures of huge expected losses to be incurred due to Obamacare. (Caterpillar alone expected to lose $100 million in 2010, according to its financial filings).

In his demand letter, Waxman had demanded that the companies produce an enormous quantity of potentially proprietary (and some legally-privileged) documents.  This demand was apparently canceled along with the hearing.

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Posted Apr 16th 2010 at 2:01 pm in Congress, Healthcare, News, Politics | 233 Comments