U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) today introduced the Real EPA Impact Reviews (REPAIR) Act, which would help facilitate a more transparent EPA regulatory impact analyses (RIA) process by requiring the EPA to include a scenario in each of its RIAs that does not contain additional proposed regulations.
“The Obama EPA’s legacy will largely be defined by the massive amount of regulations it piled onto the economy,” said Thune. “Many of these big-government regulations placed careless and unnecessary burdens on the backs of the American people and hid the true cost of what was actually being proposed. It’s important for Congress, but particularly for the American people, who could be potentially harmed by Washington regulations, to have a full understanding of what these proposed regulations mean for their families, checkbooks, and way of life.”
The REPAIR Act was prompted by the EPA’s draft RIA for lowering the National Ambient Air Quality Standard ground-level ozone, which was released on November 25, 2014. The RIA assumed that that numerous other regulations would be fully implemented, despite the possibility that these regulations may have been subject to delay, modification, or dismissal prior to finalization. The RIA also included in its baseline assumptions that the existing ozone standard would be fully implemented, despite the fact that 227 U.S. counties had yet to meet the existing standard. Such inclusions likely caused the RIA to significantly underestimate the true cost of a lower ozone standard.
Several Obama EPA rules, like the then-proposed Clean Power Plan, have been blocked in court, underscoring that they can obfuscate costs and should not be used in formulating RIAs. By prohibiting the inclusion of proposed rules and regulations in at least one RIA scenario, stakeholders will have a clearer understanding of a proposed regulation’s true compliance costs.