A legislative meeting on the national costs of overregulation quickly turned into a fight over President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size and scope of government.
During a Tuesday hearing by a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, Democratic lawmakers repeatedly shifted the conversation away from the topic of regulatory reform, arguing that the real priority should be reining in the current executive branch.
“The Administration’s outrageous and unprecedented violation of congressional lawmaking and spending power — that’s what the first hearing of this subcommittee should be about,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said. “That’s what we should be having a hearing about. Not some eerie academic conversation about the administrative state, whatever they mean by that.”
But concerns about regulatory overreach are far from academic, according to entrepreneurs and policy experts on the hearing’s witness panel.
Patrick McLaughlin from the Hoover Institution told the committee that overregulation in the U.S. has diminished economic opportunity and increased the production cost of goods, costs which American households ultimately have to pay.
McLaughlin referenced statistics showing that a 10% increase in federal regulations leads to a 2.5% increase in the poverty rate and a 4% increase in income inequality.
He supports reforms like the Midnight Rules Relief Act, currently under consideration in the House, which would allow Congress to use a single joint resolution to overturn multiple regulations issued by an administration during its final year in office.
Republican lawmakers have also reintroduced the REINS Act, which would require both chambers of Congress to specifically approve any new regulations that will cost more than $100 million annually. The Biden administration imposed $1.7 trillion cumulatively in regulatory costs on the economy, the House Oversight Committee found in September.
Rick Smith, CEO of Axon Enterprise, urged lawmakers to consolidate antitrust enforcement in the Department of Justice, arguing that all antitrust enforcement actions should be tried in an impartial Article III court, rather than the Administrative Law Court, which does not follow due process laws.
“No bureaucracy can be allowed to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury without checks and balances and oversight,” Smith said. “Every American, whether an individual, small or large corporation should have the right to a fair trial before an independent judge before the government can strip them of their livelihood, their property, or their rights.”
Witness and American entrepreneur Magatte Wade told the committee that the issue is too important to America’s national and global interests to be partisan.
Wade pointed to her home continent of Africa, both the poorest and most over regulated region in the world, as an example of how excessive government regulation cripples economies and keeps people in poverty.
“My country, Senegal, makes it even harder to hire and fire employees than in California, one of the worst US states. The result is that my people die at sea trying to escape to Europe to get jobs,” Wade testified. “When the state chokes businesses so much that people are dying, one feels greater urgency over these issues than do most Americans.”
Wade argued that Congress should immediately streamline regulatory rules for businesses, which often need to hire a team of lawyers to navigate the complex American regulatory system — an expense many American entrepreneurs cannot afford.
The Code of Federal Regulations nears 200,000 pages and includes more than 1 million regulatory restrictions.
But Raskin and other Democrats agreed with witness Steve Vladeck from Georgetown University Law Center that there are “far more pressing areas” to which the committee should focus its attention on, such as Trump’s firing of multiple inspectors general and “takeover” of U.S. foreign aid activities.
Wade finally called out Raskin for his attempts to shift the meeting’s focus on Trump and Elon Musk’s lack of procedure instead of discussing the issues at hand.
“Mr. Raskin, this whole time we’ve been here, you’ve just been complaining about ‘the process.’ I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with your issues right now about Musk and the process-following,” she said. “At some point, what is the end game? Isn’t the end game to make us, the American people, better off?”
Answering her own question, she added “No, I hear you saying that the stuff that would make us better off doesn’t matter.”
