Directing Committees to Review Regulations from Federal Agencies: House of Representatives

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Madam Speaker, I rise today to claim the Agriculture Committee's time, which I believe I am sharing with my colleague from Minnesota, and I yield myself 5 minutes.

Today, American agriculture is under attack. Every day, the administration seems to demonstrate just how vastly disconnected it is from the folks who feed us. The administration fails to realize that rural America's economy is dependent upon agriculture. The in-your-face approach that the administration has taken regarding government regulation has increased the cost of doing business for America's farmers and ranchers. If the administration is allowed to continue down this path, the only choice many farmers and ranchers will have will be to stop farming altogether. From the dairies of Vermont to the wheat fields near the Chesapeake Bay to the cornfields in the Midwest, American agriculture is under a constant barrage of irrational and unworkable regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, which are burdensome, overreaching, and that negatively affect jobs in rural economies.

This EPA is mostly interested in pursuing the extreme agenda of environmentalist groups without any consideration for the impact it will have on our farmers and ranchers. For example, the EPA wants to treat milk spills like oil spills simply because milk contains animal fat. The EPA has suggested that milk storage should be regulated under the Clean Water Act as large oil tanks. The EPA wants farmers to till fields without producing any dust. Clearly, the folks at the EPA have never stepped foot on a farm in western Oklahoma, or otherwise they would know that dust happens, and all the regulations in the world can't eliminate its existence. The EPA wants farmers to ensure that none of the spray we use for pests drifts even 1 foot away from the original source.

The EPA has started an unprecedented re-reevaluation evaluation--yes, I said re-reevaluation--of the popular wheat control product Atrazine. In 2006, the EPA completed a 12-year review involving 6,000 studies and 80,000 public comments, yet one of the first orders of business for the Obama administration was to start all over after an article appeared in The New York Times. The EPA is trying to regulate watersheds based off of inaccurate and flawed models--a problem recognized even by the top officials at USDA.

The list goes on and on. But what further illustrates the alarming frame of mind of the EPA is that the agency has gone so far as to recently hold a contest for the public to create videos explaining what Federal regulations are ``important to everyone.'' In many instances, the agency is overreaching its authority. Instead of operating within the law, the EPA believes it can order Congress to pass legislation that gives it more authority and threaten to regulate anyway if Congress chooses not to act.

The message from the President is clear: Pass a cap-and-tax bill or we'll pursue an endangerment finding. Pass more authority to regulate watersheds or we'll proceed with an Executive order.

Sadly for America's farmers and ranchers, these regulations are not limited to the EPA. The Department of Agriculture's Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyard agency's proposed rule on purported ``fairness'' far exceeds congressional intent expressed in the 2008 farm bill. It lacks a credible economic analysis and has so far been the result of a regulatory process that can only be described as flawed. We have a responsibility to producers, packers, processors, retailers--and yes, consumers--to continue to examine this proposal's implications and act accordingly.

In addition, over the past several months the CFTC and other Federal financial regulators have been engaged in writing unprecedented new regulations over the derivatives market. As Chairman Gensler reported in our committee yesterday, since September alone the CFTC has issued 39 new rule proposals involving thousands of pages of regulation. By comparison, before Dodd-Frank, the CFTC averaged about five rules per year. The speed with which the CFTC is issuing new rules precludes their ability to conduct an adequate cost-benefit analysis to ensure that the rules do not impose unnecessary or undue regulations on our financial system and our economy. And unlike many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, title VII is not limited to financial firms. In fact, it has the potential to impact every segment of our economy, from farmers and ranchers to manufacturers and energy companies to the fields of health care and technology.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. LUCAS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.

Many of the rules the CFTC has proposed would substantially increase the costs of hedging for commercial end-users, extending Wall Street regulation to Main Street companies. As we work to revive the economy and create new jobs, we simply cannot afford sweeping new regulations that are poorly vetted, that impose substantial costs that outweigh the benefit for our financial system and our economy, or that are crafted in the interest of speed rather than in sound policy.

The Agriculture Committee has set forth an aggressive oversight plan that will shine a bright light on these regulations and show the real-world consequences of them. I hope the administration will work with us in our efforts. Our Nation's farmers, ranchers, and small businesses are all counting on us to do it.

I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source