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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Law - The Congressional Review Act, ten years later
Cindy Skrzycki, who writes the Tuesday column, The Regulators, for the Washington Post, today has a column headed "Reform's Knockout Act, Kept Out of the Ring," about the Congressional Review Act, which was sponsored by former representative David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.). The CRA, Skrzycki writes:
was supposed to be the ultimate weapon for curbing big government, the knockout punch for eliminating bad rules. But a recent review of the first 10 years of the law shows it often sits in a corner unused -- and even when unleashed, it misses more regulations than it hits.The worry was that Congress delegated too much power to federal agencies to write rules to go along with the laws it passed. The CRA was designed to be a powerful oversight tool to get rid of rules that turned out substantially different than lawmakers anticipated.
The procedure allows nullification of a rule if both houses of Congress and the president disapprove of an agency action. A final rule's effective date is delayed for 60 days while Congress makes up its mind. But it has been used successfully only once, to kill a controversial ergonomics rule issued by the Clinton administration Labor Department to deal with repetitive-motion injuries.
Since the law passed in 1996, 37 joint resolutions of disapproval relating to 28 rules have been introduced, according to the Government Accountability Office . Only the ergonomic rule was voted on by both houses. * * *
[McIntosh] envisioned the law as wresting back power from the agencies and the executive branch, which had become increasingly involved in regulatory policy and review. * * *
Instead of eliminating rules, the law has generated a mountain of paperwork. Some 41,218 non-major rules and 610 major rules have been reported to Congress in the past decade. This means that copies of those rules had to be submitted to both houses of Congress and the GAO.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 18, 2006 05:08 PM
Posted to Administrative Law | General Law Related