We
need to be more transparent and accountable in other areas, too. The Department of Justice issues more than
11,000 grants each year, but it doesn't review the recipients across the
program lines. That means they could be funding the same investment multiple
times and wouldn't know it.
Clearly,
we need to review the structure of our government and modernize the way it
works. I'm sponsoring the Reforming and Consolidating Government Act of 2012,
legislation that restores executive reorganization authority and lets the president send proposals for modernizing the government to Congress for
expedited consideration. As a CEO and a governor, I had this authority -- and
the president should have it, too.
The
accumulation of regulations may be worse than programs, so I'm working on a
proposal to require all agencies -- executive and independent -- to conduct an economic
impact analysis for each of their proposed regulations costing over $100
million. This economic impact analysis would also require agencies to set
measurable goals for each regulation -- goals that can be measured over time to
ensure that they remain relevant and effective.
Indeed,
one of the biggest problems I've seen is that we never look back at existing
regulations to see if they work. And we don't know if the assumptions on costs
and benefits made at the front-end actually pan-out over the long run. We need
a legislative agency, such as the Congressional Budget Office, to review the
economic impact analyses every five years or so to determine if the regulations
are working and report this information to Congress. This independent analysis would
provide helpful data for Congress and the agencies to modify and eliminate
outdated regulations and laws.
And
we also need a short-term mechanism to address the accumulation of regulations
over time. I'd like to borrow the pay-as-you-go concept from budgeting and
apply it to regulations.
For
example, if an agency wants to add a new regulation, then they should reduce
their existing stock of regulations. This pay-as-you-go process would build off the regulatory look-back
plans that agencies recently developed to ensure that outdated and duplicative
regulations are removed from the books. The UK has implemented a similar
system. The Brits call it "One-in, One-out," and we've been
monitoring their progress as we fine-tune our legislation.
It's
our responsibility in Congress to look back and clean out the duplication, fragmentation
and waste in government. We must work across political divides to build a
modern, smarter and more efficient government that addresses the challenges of
the 21st century.