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H.R.2542, "Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2013."
Testimony by Amit Narang, Regulatory Policy Advocate, Public Citizen
U.S. House of Representatives Documents
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee,
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2013. I am Amit Narang, Regulatory Policy Advocate at Public Citizen's Congress Watch. Public Citizen is a national public interest organization with more than 300,000 members and supporters. For more than 40 years, we have successfully advocated for stronger health, safety, consumer protection and other rules, as well as for a robust regulatory system that curtails corporate wrongdoing and advances the public interest.
Public Citizen co-chairs the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards (CSS). CSS is an alliance of more than 75 consumer, small business, labor, scientific, research, good government, faith, community, health and environmental organizations joined in the belief that our country's system of regulatory safeguards provides a stable framework that secures our quality of life and paves the way for a sound economy that benefits us all. Time constraints prevented the Coalition from reviewing my testimony in advance, and today I speak only on behalf of Public Citizen.
The Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act (RFIA) seeks to help a segment of our economy that all would agree is essential to keeping our economy thriving. Unfortunately, this legislation will do little to help genuine small businesses, and will come at an enormous cost in terms of undermining our federal agencies' ability to provide crucial public health and safety protections, civil rights, workers' rights, consumer safety standards, and environmental standards.
As discussed more fully below, the RFIA takes a "sledgehammer" to the regulatory process where only a "scalpel" at most is needed. The legislation makes drastic and unnecessary reforms to the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) which, in turn, will place great pressure on federal agencies to consider almost all of their rules as significantly impacting small business, even in cases where the rule is only setting public health and safety standards for large companies. As a result, agencies will be bogged down in senseless busywork in a search for impacts on small businesses that simply do not exist. Since the RFIA does not provide any funding for the significant added mandates it imposes on...