WASHINGTON-The Clinton administration is not embracing a sweeping regulatory reform bill that would subject the wireless industry and other regulated business sectors to a new government oversight regime grounded in peer reviewed cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment in which power would be heavily concentrated in federal agency chiefs.
Given the lack of consensus on the current bill-sponsored by Sens. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.)-in Congress, the legislation is dead for this year and will have to await until next spring most likely before efforts resume to move it forward.
As such, Thompson’s Senate Governmental Committee is working with lawmakers, environmentalists, the White House and others to shore up support for the measure.
In recent years, efforts to move regulatory reform legislation have failed yet still progressed further than each previous try.
Ironically, the same Clinton White House stung with the costly failure to push through health-care reform legislation during the president’s first term is opposed to a massive, government-wide overhaul of federal regulatory rules.
“The administration believes, as do many members of Congress, that other models of regulatory reform may be more effective than enactment of additional comprehensive, one-size-fits-all, procedural requirements,” said Sally Katzen of the Office of Management and Budget in written testimony before a Senate hearing recently.
Instead, Katzen urged lawmakers to consider more narrowly tailored regulatory reform provisions like those supported by Clinton.
Indeed, the bill appears to be driven primarily by dissatisfaction with the decision making at the Environmental Protection Agency and other health and safety-related departments.
Critics claim the bill would actually make regulatory delay worse and point out that economic analyses do not measure all benefits, such as public interest and public safety.
At the same time, disdain for big government and the need for smart bureaucratic streamlining has gained increased support on both sides of the isle in Congress and in academic circles in recent years. Clinton took a stab at it through executive order and via Vice President Gore’s `reinventing government’ mission.
But Republicans argue Clinton’s efforts-and results-fall short of the mark.
At the FCC, outgoing Chairman Reed Hundt emphatically injected economic analysis into telecom regulation like no other FCC head in history.
In that regard, the cellular industry has become somewhat of a poster child for bureaucratic red tape. Industry officials and policy makers critical of the current regulatory structure are fond of decrying the fact that government delay held back cellular technology from the marketplace for 10 years and cost the economy of hundreds of millions-if not billions-of dollars as a result.
Under the Thompson-Levin measure, major rules that would have an impact of more than $100 million on the U.S. economy would be subject to cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment. Many wireless telecom actions easily reach that threshold.
Regulatory or judicial review of federal regulations would be banned, though challenges to cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments that go into decisions would be allowed.
At the same time, agency heads could unilaterally choose rules for review by an advisory committee with a 5-year time frame.
Ernest Gellhorn, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia and an expert on administrative law, said the bill “reflects the latest and best thinking on how to ensure that necessary regulations are adopted only after full public consideration of priorities, cost and benefits and less costly or intrusive alternatives.” Gellhorn said the bill “is not designed to constrict or impair essential rules, just make them smarter and less burdensome.”
