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Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act of 2025

Floor Speech

Date: Dec. 2, 2025
Location: Washington, DC

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Mr. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman and the ranking member for this debate on the floor today.

I rise in strong support of H.R. 2965, the Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act of 2025.

I certainly join those remarks of my colleagues on this side who have advocated for the bill. I would like to back up a bit and talk more generally about regulatory burden and how this bill is an important step in dealing with a much larger problem.

The chart on my right shows the number of pages in the Federal Register. The year I was born, 1968, there were about 50,000 pages. Today there are almost 200,000 pages. In my lifetime, the number of rules and regulations written by unelected Federal bureaucrats, the people in the real world that we all represent--in my case in eastern Kansas--must comply with, has quadrupled.

I will guarantee you, Mr. Speaker, that is a silent tax increase on every American and every small business in all of our States.

The estimated regulatory compliance cost for businesses in the United States is about $3 trillion per year. As has been mentioned, about $1.8 trillion of that was added in just the 4 years of the prior administration. To put that in context, the entire Federal budget is about $7 trillion per year.

Do you know what the difference is between a tax and a regulatory command, Mr. Speaker? With a tax, the Federal Government says to, in this case, a small business owner: Give me your money, and we will spend it on priorities that we decide. With a regulation, the Federal Government says to that same small business owner: You take your money and spend it on the priorities that we decide. Not on hiring more people, not on growing and expanding, not on giving charitable support in our communities, not on doing all of the things that small businesses do, but as people in this town have decided. That is what is at stake here. That is why we have to take this action.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of this measure because it is one step toward peaking that mountain of regulation, making small businesses freer to do what they do, making life more affordable to all the people I represent who buy and sell on Main Street each and every day.

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