OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2023

Floor Speech

Date: June 13, 2023
Location: Washington, DC

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Mr. TIFFANY. Mr. Chairman, it is good to join Representative Massie, once again, here tonight in regard to the REINS Act.

I want to share with everybody a real-world example of how the REINS Act could be used. I think back to the Boiler MACT issue, which was over a decade ago.

That was an administrative rule that was put in place administratively. It was not passed by the United States Congress. If the REINS Act would have been in place, we would have prevented the example I am about to give you.

There was a smokestack that had to be built on a paper plant in northern Wisconsin that cost $10-plus million. It was meant to reduce emissions that were coming from that paper plant.

Do you know how much it reduced emissions, Mr. Chairman? Zero. No emissions were reduced as a result of them spending $10 million as a result of this administrative rule, Boiler MACT, that was put in place.

Think about the ripple effect of that. That company had to spend $10 million of their scarce capital on that. They wanted to do an expansion to be able to build an addition onto their plant that would make an advanced fiber that is being used on modern-day jets, commercial aircraft.

As a result of that, they had to go to Oneida County and get a loan in order to do the expansion on their plant. It put the taxpayers of Oneida County on the hook rather than them simply spending their scarce capital and being able to make this addition that created another 40 to 50 jobs.

That is the impact that we see as a result of the people's House not voting on something like this.

This is really simple. These are the ABCs of good government. The agencies should have to come back to the United States Congress to be able to do something--that is, to institute a rule that is going to cost more than tens of millions of dollars.

If this would have happened, if this would have been in effect, we would have not seen something like this previously.

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