Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Regulatory Impact Scale on the Economy Small Business Act, also known as the RISE Act. One of Congress's most fundamental responsibilities is to provide oversight to its vast regulatory structure, particularly as it pertains to small businesses. However, Congress lacks the proper framework to effectively monitor the impact of regulatory activity on small businesses. Today, there is no transparent, standardized means to realize the economic scale of regulatory rules, either proposed or finalized, to frame their economic significance on a comparative basis. Likewise, the American public also has no means to effectively gauge and monitor the significance of regulatory rules. With the current lack of scale, there is no means to categorically delineate between a ``big regulation'' and a ``really big regulation,'' resulting in less effective oversight.

In addition, agencies wield tremendous discretionary power in determining whether required small business analysis applies. Today, regulatory flexibility analysis is triggered when a proposed rule is determined by the issuing agency to have a ``significant economic impact'' on a substantial number of small entities. However,

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Congress has provided no bright-line standard to determine what constitutes significant economic impact, allowing agencies to exercise an unnecessary amount of leniency to bypass regulatory flexibility analysis, which is meant to give special consideration to small businesses.

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