Obama Promises To Fix Regulations But Is Set To Regulate Even More

Next week President Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union address, which outlines his legislative agenda for the year, to a new Congress with one house controlled by Republicans. Still, the president remains in command of a powerful tool to continue pursuing his own agenda, namely the broad rule-making powers that federal agencies under his direction wield.

For starters, the Obama administration’s signature new laws---Obamacare, signed last spring, and the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, which became law in July--will require a blizzard of new rules from myriad agencies responsible for enforcing them.

Already, the Internal Revenue Service and the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services have promulgated more than 1,000 pages of rules related to the health-care act, and the total will reach more than 10,000 pages, estimates Inside Counsel, a magazine for corporate lawyers.

The Dodd-Frank bill will require some 240 new rules from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Further, the White House is using its rule-making powers in aggressively political ways. In its most notable move, the administration used the threat of extensive new environmental regulations to get Congress to pass a law to fight climate change.

When Congress failed to act, the Environmental Protection Agency went ahead with the new rules, which included declaring carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas and demanding that manufacturers seeking permits for new facilities install the “best available technology” to control emissions, though the agency has yet to define what that technology is.

Other federal agencies have been nearly as busy. At Obama’s request, the Department of Labor now requires firms that contract with the federal government to inform employees that they have the right to unionize and bargain collectively.

The department also expanded the requirements of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Previously, working parents had to get time off to care for sick kids; now, grandparents, domestic partners, and anyone who provides financial support or day-to-day care for children are eligible, too.

The labor department also required any contractor doing stimulus-financed weatherization to pay prevailing wages, which are generally on par with union pay scales.

The union-friendly Obama labor department did, however, get rid of one significant regulation--a Bush-administration rule that unions file disclosure statements on how they spend their members’ money. The disclosure rule had helped prompt a number of investigations of abuses, including a Los Angeles Times series that resulted in the removal of the head of a Service Employees International Union local for misallocating hundreds of thousands of dollars of members’ money.

The Obama administration considered the transparency requirement an excessive burden on unions.

Other new Obama regulations cover everything from transportation to classrooms. The Department of Transportation, for example, issued a new rule requiring train operators to install systems that monitor and control train movements, known as “positive train controls.” Estimated cost to the industry: $10 billion.

The energy department, meanwhile, has issued new, higher standards for efficient-energy use for everything from washing machines to water heaters. The department even redefined what constitutes a showerhead in order to regulate more stringently new multinozzle shower fixtures that, the Obama administration argues, waste water.

The Department of Education has discussed applying the gender quotas of Title IX to college courses in math and science in an effort to force colleges to recruit more women as majors in these subjects.

And the administration may just be getting started.

Although the president said last week that he was ordering a review of regulations throughout the federal bureaucracy, his administration’s regulatory agenda identifies some 4,000 rules under development, says Susan Dudley, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Bush.

This is big government by the back door.

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner