The GOP has declared war on the nation’s regulatory agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, and Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia is one of their top congressional lieutenants.
This month, he reintroduced the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act in the House while Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced companion legislation in the Senate.
“The Sunshine Act represents a commitment I made to regulatory reform in my first term in office,” Collins told the Washington Examiner. “Consent decrees weren’t designed as tools for backroom deals without the input of the people they impact most. This legislation lessens the power of bureaucrats to burden hardworking Americans with rules that bog down our economy and erode Americans’ right to know about and respond to federal rulemaking.”
Shortened to the Sunshine Act, it restricts agencies’ ability to reach agreements with affected entities to bring them into compliance with federal laws and rules. Such agreements usually stem from lawsuits, which are then scuttled in favor of mediation to reach a legally binding consent order.
Such “sue-and-settle” arrangements are unfair, favor outside groups and are not subject to public scrutiny, Collins argues.
“What we were having is basically the usurpation of what should be the normal process,” Collins said. “Regulatory law should never be determined by outside groups.”
Advocacy groups, such as environmental organizations, will claim that a company or municipality or individual is violating the Clean Water Act, for example. Or they’ll notice that the EPA missed a deadline for rulemaking. Then they file suit. The entity that allegedly isn’t complying with federal laws will then sit down with regulators and hash out a settlement that dismisses the suit.
The negotiations are private and the resulting consent decree becomes federal regulation.
Environmental groups are “basically calling their friends at the EPA” and colluding with them by bringing a suit, forcing an industry or other entity that otherwise was resisting the EPA to the negotiating table, then finalizing rules that everyone else will also have to follow without the usual lengthy, rulemaking process, Collins said.
The results are “sweetheart side deals for environmental groups and others who know they can’t get the laws they want” through Congress, he said.
Under his legislation, agencies would have to publicly post and inform Congress about such complaints and the resulting agreements. Complaints could not be filed and settled the same day, thereby barring pre-negotiated consent decrees. Regulators would have to inform all interested parties about complaints and allow them to join settlement negotiations. And agencies would have to publish consent decrees in the Federal Register and open a 60-day public comment period before the agreements are finalized.
“Consent decrees are a very valuable tool” that regulators should be able to use, Collins said. His law “just makes sure all affected parties can join in and know what’s happening” before being subjected to new rules.
Collins used the Maximum Achievable Control Technology Utility Rule as an example of a regulation stemming from a “sweetheart” consent decree.
He claims it costs affected industries more than $9 billion annually to comply, and that the emissions restrictions it enforces were outside the Clean Air Act, the law under which the suit was filed.
Congress, and the public, should be allowed a say in such major regulations, Collins said.
“Some of these issues are not partisan issues,” he said about Republicans’ overall effort to have more say in the regulatory process. “It’s just good governance. I don’t want a Republican president circumventing Congress either.”
