Destroying Unnecessary, Misaligned, and Prohibitive Red Tape Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of the DUMP Red Tape Act and thank Representative Wied for his leadership on this crucial deregulatory initiative.

In addition to regulations that are promulgated pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, there exists a vast scope of additional regulatory documents that impact small businesses. These are guidance documents, memoranda, bulletins, circulars, letters, and more, which Wayne Crews, a fellow in regulatory studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has more properly referred to as regulatory dark matter.

Only rules that are adopted pursuant to the APA actually carry the force of law. Yet, in practice, agencies seek to skew the intent of congressional law and impose other requirements through this regulatory dark matter, thereby avoiding compliance with the APA requirements.

Identifying the full scope of the regulatory state as it exists through this dark matter is not only a challenge for Congress and the agencies themselves but for our small businesses, as well.

Under the first Trump administration, agencies cataloged or attempted to catalog all of these various guidance documents, but as soon as he took office, President Biden stripped away this essential transparency measure in the early days.

The reality is that reforming the regulatory state begins with identifying its true magnitude, and that is an exercise which Congress simply cannot do alone.

The deregulatory agenda President Trump instituted, which resulted in the creation of the SBA Office of Advocacy's Red Tape Hotline, captures this reality.

It does so by creating a forum by which to partner with the small businesses of America, who can identify sector-specific regulations that impose undue regulatory compliance challenges and costs.

By voting for the DUMP Red Tape Act, we can codify this hotline and the essential role that it plays and make permanent this partnership with America's small businesses in a much-needed deregulatory effort.

Federal regulation's total compliance costs and economic effects are at least $2.155 trillion, which equates to over $16,000 in annual hidden regulatory costs to the American taxpayer. If we truly care about affordability, about the economy, about small businesses and their consumers, then there is no better policy than deregulation, and this bill will further empower the SBA Office of Advocacy in coordination with the small businesses that it represents.

Mr. Speaker, I thank again Representative Wied and Chairman Williams for their leadership on this important issue, and I urge my colleagues to vote in favor.

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