Hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform: Is Uncle Sam Still Passing the Buck? The Burden of Unfunded Mandates on State, County, City Gov..
HEARING OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM: IS UNCLE SAM STILL PASSING THE BUCK? THE BURDEN OF UNFUNDED MANDATES ON STATE, COUNTY, AND CITY GOVERNMENTS
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Mrs. Foxx. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Graham, we appreciate your testimony very much. I know you are trying to add value to our work.
Could you tell us what is a common problem you are encountering in working to ensure that the regulations are complied with? What is the biggest obstacle?
Mr. Graham. I think the biggest obstacle we see in addressing the issues around unfunded mandates quite frankly are the actual requirements in statute that Congress has placed on the executive branch with regard to unfunded mandates. And we have to keep in mind that the laws that underpin these unfunded mandates extend back many years, sometimes decades. A
lot of them were developed without a clear consideration of how the consequences of them would be financed.
So if the thrust of your question is, what is the biggest problem we commonly face when we are dealing with an agency around what is argued to be an unfunded mandate, it is that we have a law, a statute passed by Congress which is basically
forcing an agency to move in a direction that creates that unfunded mandate. There is not necessarily a lot of discretion in the executive branch to handle that.
Where there is discretion to handle it, and oftentimes there is such discretion, we work very hard at OMB with the agencies to try to find ways to reduce the cost of the unfunded mandate while maintaining whatever the public objective is, whether it be civil rights, public health, environment, worker safety or whatever.
Mrs. Foxx. Mr. Chairman, could I do a followup?
Mr. Davis. Sure. You can go until your red light is on.
Mrs. Foxx. Have you made any recommendations on ways that those requirements could be modified? Or do you see that as
your responsibility?
Mr. Graham. I don't think that we have, and quite frankly, we are very well burdened at OMB just making sure that we keep track for each of these 500 rulemakings a year that we review that agencies are in fact addressing their obligations under
the Unfunded Mandates Act and the Executive order. So we have been in the trenches, working hard just making sure that we're trying to get compliance with what we currently have out there.
Mrs. Foxx. One more question, then. Could you, without our creating another agency, which I don't think anybody really wants to do, is there a way that we could deal with that with the problem that you brought up, the requirements themselves,
other than doing it on a case by case basis? Is there any other vehicle for taking care of that problem that you know of?
Mr. Graham. I think there are two aspects of the problem. One is the legislative creation of unfunded mandates by the U.S. Congress and the President, because presumably the President signs these laws into enactment. And I think frankly, my colleague Dr. Holtz-Eakin from CBO probably knows better than I do the actual ways in which the Unfunded Mandates Act is
actually informing the Congress and how it addresses those issues.
Within the executive branch, in areas where we have discretion in this area, I think one of the things that Congress can do that's very constructive is actually have oversight hearings on specific regulations that involve an unfunded mandate and ask Federal agencies and OMB if you will, what exactly they did in the course of that rulemaking to cushion and keep to a minimum the cost burden of that regulation while still achieving their objective. I think the process of doing that oversight would, I think, offer insight into how to move forward.
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