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“RETURNING DECISIONMAKING TO THE STATES AND LOCALITIES” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2482-H2485 on March 1, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
RETURNING DECISIONMAKING TO THE STATES AND LOCALITIES
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Waldholtz). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 1995, the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Ehrlich] is recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. EHRLICH. Madam Speaker, I rise to enter into a colloquy with my colleague from California. Madam Speaker, cliches are very popular in politics as we all know, particularly in election years. Everyone is pro-small business, everyone loves the family, everyone is tough on crime, everyone likes the middle class, cares about the middle class, wants to support the middle class.
The problem, Madam Speaker, is that right here in the House of Representatives is where the rubber meets the road, and cliches are know longer good enough. This is where the votes occur, this is where the lines are drawn in the sand and this is where positions are taken that we must defend come every other November.
Right now the tough votes with respect to regulatory reform are being taken every day in this House. It is part of the Contract With America, it is a very important part of the Contract With America, but it is also what the people want.
[[Page H2483]] I direct a comment to my colleague from California. I was amazed, Madam Speaker, that in the course of our campaign we targeted the small business community, we went around top strip shopping malls and would ask owners what is the number one issue for you ma'am, or sir. And I thought the answer I would receive would concern itself with the legal environment in the State of Maryland, or the availability of capital, or employee problems. But, Madam Speaker, by far and away the No. 1 problem that the small business community in the second district has is the regulatory burden that government at all levels has placed upon it. And this was surprising to me.
And I direct a question to my colleague from California. Did he also find this to be the case in his campaign?
Mr. RADANOVICH. If I may, if the gentleman will yield, I would like to tell the audience a bit of a story that happened in my district with regard to small business. There was a killer in my district. My name is George Radanovich from the San Joaquin Valley in California. A little to the south of me, not necessarily in my district but very close, there was a killer on the loose and the Federal Government swooped down on this person one day and came down on this killer as he was disking his farm there in Kern County, CA and arrested the man. He was, as I said, out on a tractor disking his field as he was preparing it for the crop he was hoping to harvest a few months later. This man was the killer. They arrested him and they took the weapon at the scene of the crime. And the weapon itself was a tractor and in disking what he had done was he had killed five rats, and this was under the Endangered Species regulation. Actually, he is in court right now facing I believe a 6-year sentence and a $100,000 fine, and what he did was he killed five rats while he was trying to go about the business of farming on the ground that he owned.
This is the kind of legislation, Madam Speaker, that we are running into in our districts, and it is not so much, granted you know the way that they are dealing with this issue is a real problem, but the whole point of the problems in endangered species legislation or any regulation is where it is coming from.
And I think we heard plenty today and over the past few weeks when we are trying to get rid of some of the regulations that come out of this body, what we are trying to do is send it to the local level so that at the local level those regulations will begin to make a little bit of sense. When the far-reaching arm of Washington reaches down from 3,000 miles away and abducts a farmer for disking his own field or killing rats, it is a pretty good indication of the fact that regulation from Washington does not work very well. Food programs from Washington do not work very well, crime programs from Washington do not work very well in Fresno.
What we need to do and I hope what we are doing by block granting is getting those funds into the district and placing them into the proper hands for people to take care of the problem locally, because I do not know, nobody in this body knows how to take care of crime better in Fresno than my mayor, Jim Patterson, and my police chief, Ed Winchester and my sheriff, Steve Magarian. Those guys know it the best, and that is the problem I have with regulation coming out of this floor out of Washington, DC.
My colleague from Maryland has some similar examples as well, and I am sure he would like to be able to relate them. I have a whole list of these too.
Mr. EHRLICH. I know you know, but I only have all night. Actually we do not have all night, and I thank the gentleman from California.
I think the American people are finding out that one of the themes behind the Contract With America was this devolution of power back from the Federal Government to the States, to the local, because as the gentleman so eloquently stated, the locals know better. They know what best to do with the money that the taxpayers generate. And in this way we can cut out the middle-man and in fact send them the same amount of money and get better service, and that is what this whole thing is all about.
I know the gentleman is familiar with some of the more dramatic numbers, Madam Speaker, that have been generated over the last few years. The number of pages in the Federal Register reached 64,914 in 1994, the most since 1980. Federal regulatory agencies currently employ 131,412 people at an annual cost of $11.9 billion, both record numbers.
The Clinton regulatory plan released last
November, which I know the gentleman is familiar with, shows that the administration plans to pursue 43,000 additional regulatory actions after FY 1995 and beyond. In the last 6 months of FY 1994 alone, the Federal Government completed 767 rules and regulations. The Clinton Administration's National Performance Review stated that the compliance costs imposed by Federal regulations on the private sector alone were
``at least $430 billion per year or 9 percent of our gross domestic product,'' and as the gentleman knows, one of the frustrating parts of this debate is the fact that we have not focused in on the job loss. We zero in on costs, we talk about anecdotes, we have our anecdotes, the other side has their anecdotes, but we do not quantify. And I am not sure it is quantifiable, the extent to which overregulation costs us jobs in this economy.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Madam Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I have another tale of what happens in my district. I also represent grazing land in the Sierra National Forest. Part of my district allows, over the past 20 years, cattleman to do summer grazing in the Sierras by permit. There are people who have been up there and using the same ground over a 20-year period.
Let me tell you, Madam Speaker, what is happening in my district right now, and this is through the National Environmental Policy Act which requires a biological study now for everybody who goes up in there. Remember, these people have been up there for the past 20 years. And they are gearing up for their season which when the snow melts will start this spring. They are being told through this National Environmental Policy Act that they have to do a biological study. This requires thousands of dollars, it requires months to do. If they were to do it now, it would be ready in the winter of the following year. They could be locked out of 1 year in the Sierra Nevadas.
My cattleman in my area are facing the fact of having to sell down the herds they have built up over many many years and taking capital gains losses over that, simply because a rule that stated that these people have to go through biological studies that will take months instead of being flexible to allow that to happen over a period of maybe 1 or 2 years, knowing the fact that they have been up there for the last hundreds of years and the Sierras are still there, that they cannot demonstrate any flexibility. That represents a loss of business and a loss of jobs, and again it is just another example of laws and regulations coming out of Washington that are better served coming out at the local level because they make more sense.
Mr. EHRLICH. If the gentleman will yield, the point is very well-
taken. When we talk about regulations sometimes we forget it is the American consumer in fact who actually pays the cost, not just with respect to job loss but also increased prices at the grocery store for instance, because it is at the supermarket where the impact of all of the regulations we have been talking about on this floor for the last week hit home.
I was shocked when the Food Marketing Institute, for instance, which represents supermarkets and grocery wholesale ears described to me all of the regulations that go into the distribution of grocery products to consumers.
I think the gentleman will agree we have the most efficient food distribution system in the world, bringing customers a wide variety of goods at lowest possible prices despite the best efforts of bureaucrats and regulators to add layers of inefficiency and costs to the process, but it is acronym city and that is the problem. We have the USDA, we have FDA, we have the FTC, we have the ICC we have the DOT, we have OSHA, we have EPA, we have the DOI, we have the CPSC and who knows what other collection of letters and acronyms that govern and
[[Page H2484]] micromanage, in my view, the way this particular industry operates.
Most of the regulations are well-intended; we all know that. I think we can all agree with the other side with respect to that point. Some are necessary. But all of them add up to a staggering amount of paperwork and we are going to get into that in a minute I know, and red tape and costs that often makes food distributors feel as though their primary business is satisfying government regulators and not meeting consumer demands. And if the gentleman would let me just have another 20 seconds I will throw an example in here, and I know the gentleman has a lot of anecdotes he wants to share with the American people and I also want to hear them, but let us begin with the basic food group, fruits and vegetables.
Does the gentleman know under PACA, the 65-year-old Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, retailers and wholesale grocers are forced to pay a fee for the privilege of selling fresh and frozen products in their own stores? Grocers pay millions of dollars in license fees, and that is what they are, license fees, for this outdated, inefficient, and unfair program.
Five years ago an advisory committee recommended changes to PACA. No changes have been implemented.
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I have in my hand, in fact, a letter from a constituent in Maryland. He owns a small chain of grocery stores right around the corner from where I live with my wife. PACA costs his four stores alone $1,600 a year; his contribution, one grocer in Maryland's contribution, to the
$500 billion annual cost of Federal regulation in the grocery industry alone.
It gets crazier.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Madam Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I have another story.
I think in my district an article was written recently in our local paper that talked about the hand ``Biting the Hand that Feeds Us'' was the name of this article in Fresno, and it talked about how we are biting the hand of big Government that is feeding my valley to the tune of about $4.6 billion a year, and the article went on to say that it covers the various benefits, quote unquote benefits, that come from Washington into the district to the tune of about $4.6 billion. That includes everything, pensions, AFDC, farm subsidies, the whole bit. You name it. Four point six billion dollars in there.
And the tone of the article, which is quite interesting, was the fact that we are--you know, can the valley survive a hit of $4.6 billion, and went on to say how, no, we cannot, we cannot survive without the help of the Federal Government. In a small sentence at the end of the article it did say, however, that $5.3 billion left the valley to come to Washington, and so the point that was never made was that $5.3 billion was paid in taxes from my district. My district got $4.6 billion less. Now there is a discrepancy there of about $700 million, and I would like to make the case that if that, those dollars, never left Fresno, solving the same problems, they would have $700 million more to deal with on the local level, and, my colleagues, that is what I think we are trying to get at here in Washington when we are talking about regulatory control.
No. 1, the regulations do not make sense from Washington. No. 2, you give the money back to the States and let them deal with their own problems. They got more money to begin with, and they are going to be much more reasonable in their regulation.
It boils down to me, too, of trusting other people.
Mr. EHRLICH. Madam speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I know many people on our side have thousands of anecdotes we would love to share with the American people. We have all been doing that on talk radio, C-
Span, in newspapers, in town meetings with our constituents.
Just a short one for you:
What about the cardboard boxes that contain grocery products that we all buy? The Department of Labor has fined grocers literally millions of dollars, and they are still doing it because a 1954 regulation named the Hazardous Occupation Order No. 12 prohibits 16- and 17-year-olds from even tossing a cardboard box into a baler. Has the administration revised the law to keep up with the safety design standards found in all modern balers? No. Does the administration have any data to justify its unrelenting enforcement? No.
Last year, before we got here, 72 Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, asked the administration to address this issue. Still no action, and that goes back to the earlier point, the job loss. We need to focus in on that in the course of our debate over this whole issue of regulatory
reform in our country.
Do you agree?
Mr. RADANOVICH. I agree with you, and I have got another tale to tell:
Madam Speaker, water is an important commodity in our district. We have a network of dams that supply agricultural water and also water to our cities. Under a different majority in 1992 we had what is called the CVPIA, which is the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. During that time there was a study to be initiated on one of the major streams in my district that was dammed, and the study would require $5 million allocated for that study as well to study the establishment, reestablishment, of a fishery, and what the study was intended to show in 1996 was a way that we could take water from agriculture and reestablish a fishery that had disappeared with the establishment of the dam in the 1960's. The study was supposed to say that any project that came up with that, those results, had to be reasonable, prudent and feasible, and so since 1992 they began their study, and just the mere consideration of this study, which everybody knew would bankrupt agriculture in the valley for the amount of water that would have to be taken from agriculture to replenish this stream, my farmers were facing decrease in land values. They were not getting loans at the bank simply because of the mere thought of doing something like this. Everybody knew that it was going to take so much water that it would literally destroy agriculture in my valley.
Thank God the other day we were able to stop this study, but it is just another example of somebody's idea of, yes, it would be very nice to have fish back in the San Joaquin River. You put a price tag to that with these ideas that come out of Washington. You can quickly find that they are neither reasonable, prudent and feasible, and you do not have to spend $5 million finding that out.
And the list goes on, and again I think that it drives home the point that we in Washington and these Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are going to have to realize that America can trust not only us, but every other elected official all the way down to dog catcher in Main Street USA to successfully deal with problems and allow them to do that. I think that is what the evolution is all about, and I think that is what block granting is all about. It is by Members of Congress admitting that they do not know, they do not know every detail of the problems in every little town and downtown America.
Mr. EHRLICH. Madam Speaker, if the gentleman would yield on that point, just a short question.
All the horror stories that we hear, regardless of the issue, welfare, crime, regulation, at the very foundation of these horror stories, or these alleged horror stories, or these fear-mongering stories, it seems to me is implicit distrust of the State governments in this country, of local governments in this country, and concomitant with that is the thought that only the Federal Government can do it right, and we cannot trust in this country any other level of government.
Mr. RADANOVICH. In the recent crime bill, which is interesting because it illustrates this point, during the debate on the crime bill which were block granting funds down to the State level, and hopefully to the local level and back into the jurisdictions where they can solve their problems, a comment was made by someone on the other side of the aisle saying the very same thing, that we cannot trust. What we cannot do is trust the people on the local level to
properly implement those funds.
And I am sitting here thinking I have got prime problems in Fresno, CA. That is the heart of my district. It is a wonderful place, but it has got a problem with crime, and I am sitting here
[[Page H2485]] thinking I am going to trust this person on the other side of the aisle who has never been to Fresno, I guarantee it, to know how to solve problems in my community. By the way, midnight basketball would not work there--and not trust the people, the good people that are really on the frontlines trying to solve the problems, and to trust them to do it, and I mean I do not even know enough about how to solve crime in Fresno.
What I do is I rely on the people that the citizens of those communities elected to solve those problems and give them every resource that I can unencumbered, and it is this basic mistrust that is why I wanted to give that argument. It is that basic mistrust of local and State officials is what the problem the other side of the aisle has.
Mr. EHRLICH. Let alone the private sector; G-d forbid we would trust the private sector.
In fact, and I do not think the gentleman from California saw this, just the roofers in my district, just one small industry in the Second Congressional District in Maryland, sent to me 50 pages of petitions asking me to support House Bill 450. Can you imagine if we magnify, if we multiply, this times all the small business people in this country who are crying out for help who cannot afford to hire a lawyer to represent them in an administrative action or a legal proceeding or cannot afford the plane fare to come here in Washington and plead their case?
I know the gentleman from California wants to comment on this, but it seems to me that we need House Bill 450. We need the moratorium. Let us inventory all these regulations. We are not saying they are all bad; some are absolutely required. We have built in emergency exceptions, as the gentleman will recall from the debate last week. We need cost-
benefit analysis and risk assessment. Since when did this become such a radical thought? When did looking at the relative costs and looking at the relative benefits, in addition to the absolute risk that a particular regulation brings into question, when did that become such a radical thought in this government?
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I think the gentleman will also agree that the Regulatory Flexibility Act, House Bill 926 we debated today with respect to judicial review, is an idea whose time has come; paperwork reduction on the floor last week, is an idea whose time has come, making it stronger; and, of course, private property protection. Since when did the idea that government should pay for infringing on your right, your constitutional right, to enjoy your own private property, when did that become a radical thought in this country, I would ask the gentleman?
Mr. RADANOVICH. If the gentleman will yield, I guess I want to respond by saying that we on this side of the aisle, the gentleman from Maryland and I, are both freshmen, we are new here, but everybody on this side of the aisle has been accused of hating mom and kids and apple pie and dogs and everything else. The
point that we are trying to get across to the American people is that we have more resources to solve problems if they depend less on 435 elected officials and begin to depend more on the thousands of elected officials all across the land. That is when we will start getting regulation that makes sense, and people will begin respecting this body once we begin to respect other elected officials on the local level to do the right thing. Because I have no question, I am here to do the right thing, and I do not question any other Member of this House to say that they are not doing the right thing, because I believe they are. But the fact of the matter is we have got to begin to trust in the elected system and that the people that sent us here also sent other people to other posts and we can allow them to have the responsibility to do their jobs, and keeping tax dollars in districts.
Mr. EHRLICH. I think the gentleman makes a good point. No one questions motive.
Mr. RADANOVICH. I get tired of hearing I hate apple pie, mom, and kids.
Mr. EHRLICH. It is fear mongering. you see it played out time and time again in the national politics everyday that we have the Contract With America on the floor of this House. Because the problem is, and I think some people either do not want to admit this, they still deny it, they do not want to confront it, is that the American people voted for fundamental change in this country on November 8th. And we are here, me and you, we are a tangible result of that change. And it is not a partisan issue, but it is a conservative issue. The people that the American people sent to this House this time are willing to challenge the fundamental assumptions that this Government and this House in fact has operated under for the last 40 years. We are ready to return power to the states, we are ready to return power to the local governments, and we are ready to return power to the people. That is what we campaigned on, and that is what we intend to deliver, Madam Speaker. I know the gentleman from California has a lot of anecdotes he would like to share.
Mr. RADANOVICH. I think I got my point across. I just needed to say that. I think American needs to hear the fact we are here trying to do some good, and I think we are. But until we start relying on other people in this country, you know, it is going to get worse.
Mr. EHRLICH. It is that concept of personal responsibility.
Madam Speaker, we appreciate the opportunity to talk about this issue tonight, and we will at this point yield back the remainder of our time.
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