Boehner Assails the Obama Administration's 4,257 New Regulatory Actions

That 4,257 in the headline looks like a made-up number but, it isn’t. It is the actual number of new regulatory actions underway at the moment. The number comes from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs web site. Speaker Boehner’s letter requesting information about these 4,257 regulatory actions comes as the Obama administration is publicly claiming that it is cutting red tape to save Americans money and reduce the government’s footprint. That claim does not square up very well with the fact that the administration has 4,257 new regulatory actions in the works. And of that staggering number, more than 200 may have an impact of $100 million or more.

A simple scan of the Obama Administration’s current regulatory agenda indicates that the Administration currently has 4,257 new regulatory actions in the works, of which at least 219 will have an economic impact of $100 million or more.  That is an increase of nearly 15 percent over last year, when a similar search showed 191 new economically-significant regulatory actions by the Administration to be in the works.  Americans know from the Administration’s own statements that some of these new economically-significant regulations will have an economic impact of tens of billions of dollars.  But how many, exactly?  The Administration hasn’t said.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) today sent a letter to President Obama noting the scheduled increase in regulatory action by the Administration and asking that the White House provide Congress with a list of all of the regulatory actions it plans that would have an economic impact of $1 billion or more.  The Speaker formally requested that the White House provide this information before Congress returns this fall, when the House is scheduled to resume work on legislation promised in the Pledge to America that would require congressional approval for any new regulatory action that is projected to have a significant impact on job creation.

When you consider the NLRB’s actions, the EPA’s new rules that threaten to force power plant shutdowns leading to blackouts, the oil permitorium, ObamaCare, etc, that legislation is long overdue. These are just the headline-generating regulations being imposed, out of the literally 4,257 new regulations impacting the US economy, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. According to Boehner’s letter, just one of the EPA’s new rules will cost $90 billion per year. The regulatory state has come to dominate the US economy in the past couple of years. It’s little wonder, then, that unemployment remains high.

In his letter to the president, Speaker Boehner notes that he sought similar information on regulations from the Obama administration last August, but the administration didn’t bother to respond.