Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of my amendment to prohibit the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, from implementing its April 6, 2023, revisions to OMB Circular A-4.
These revisions are an attempt to rewrite and water down the regulatory guardrails currently in place so that the Biden administration can promulgate regulations that dramatically overstate the benefits and underrepresent the costs.
The Biden administration has big plans to spend your hard-earned money and reshape your way of life. They are working to concoct all manner of massively expensive regulations, including rules on climate change, social equity, income redistribution, and creating a ``social cost of carbon.''
However, even the profligate Biden administration has realized that it faces checks and guardrails on its regulatory authorities as a result of OMB's Circular A-4, which provides objective and nonpartisan guidance to agencies for considering the impacts of different regulatory actions.
OMB Circular A-4 came from a 1993 Clinton-era executive order providing agencies with a framework and guardrails for considering different regulatory approaches that truly maximize benefits for the American people and minimize costs.
The April 6, 2023, revisions to OMB Circular A-4 are a departure from bipartisan and widely accepted practices and principles and are a thinly veiled attempt to push through the radical leftist agenda by stacking the deck in favor of extremely costly regulations.
Perhaps the most egregious part of these revisions to Circular A-4 is that they will allow agencies to consider not only the benefits of regulations to Americans, who are the ones footing the bill, but benefits that accrue across the entire world. This would surely result in agencies dramatically overstating the purported benefits of regulations that can be seen as having global benefits, such as anything invoking the phrases ``climate change'' or ``social cost of carbon.''
In order to enact its radical agenda, the Biden administration needs to rewrite OMB Circular A-4 so that the cost of its regulatory regime can be minimized and the benefits dramatically overstated.
We must reject the attempt to ``stack the deck'' so the Biden administration can radically reshape our lives and reach even deeper into our pockets.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, we do not need this concoction of ``social cost of carbon'' visited upon us in this country that will cost us lots and lots of money.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, again, we need to stop the Biden administration from implementing its revisions to OMB Circular A-4. We don't need to water down the regulatory guardrails currently in place and dramatically overstate the benefits and underrepresent the costs of their rules. This needs to be stopped.
Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``yes'' vote on my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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