Sen. Thune reintroduces bill to reform EPA regulatory impact analysis process
U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) recently reintroduced the Real EPA Impact Reviews (REPAIR) Act, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to include a scenario in each of its regulatory impact analyses (RIA) that does not include any additional proposed regulations.
“It’s important for Congress, but particularly for the American people, who could be potentially harmed by Washington regulations, to have a full understanding of what these proposed regulations mean for their families, checkbooks, and way of life,” Thune said.
The EPA’s draft RIA for lowering the National Ambient Air Quality Standard ground-level ozone, which was released on November 25, 2014, prompted Thune to introduce the legislation. The RIA assumed that various regulations would be fully implemented, although the execution of many of them was delayed, or the rules were modified or dismissed prior to finalization. According to Thune, including these regulations in RIAs led the EPA to underestimate the cost of their proposed regulations.
“The Obama EPA’s legacy will largely be defined by the massive amount of regulations it piled onto the economy,” Thune said. “Many of these big-government regulations placed careless and unnecessary burdens on the backs of the American people and hid the true cost of what was actually being proposed.”
Thune first introduced the REPAIR Act in May 2015.
