Title: Reviving regulatory reform
Description: "This report has a twofold purpose: reinvigorate public debate on regulatory reform, and help policymakers fashion a more affordable, effective, and accountable regulatory system.  The report is organized as follows.  Section II examines the role of regulatory policy in sabotaging the 1990s economic boom.  It finds that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, which subjected the telecommunications industry to a "what's yours is mine" regime of infrastructure socialism and price control, inflicted trillion-dollar losses on an industry that was a key driver of the nation's economic growth.  Regulatory excess contributed to and prolonged the recession.  The section concludes that Congress and the president, who are entrusted with stewardship of the U.S.  economy, cannot afford to leave major regulatory decisions in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats.  Section III tackles head on the opinion that regulatory reform is a pipedream--a thankless quest fraught with political peril and little chance of success.  The chapter argues that although reformers in the 104th, 105th, and 106th Congresses failed to establish cost-benefit analysis and risk-assessment as touchstones of regulatory decision-making, they also achieved some notable successes.  The Unfunded Mandates Relief Act (UMRA) has discouraged Congress from imposing new regulatory burdens on state and local governments.  The Regulatory Flexibility Act, as amended by Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) and buttressed by President Bush's Executive Order 13272, has, in some measure, reined in regulatory costs and agency discretion.  The section recommends that future reform efforts be clearly based on three recognized principles of good government: cost disclosure, political accountability, and competition.  Section IV examines the basic flaws of the current process.  Regulatory costs are large, growing, and, what is more disturbing, uncontrolled.  Federal fiscal discipline is indeed weak, but federal regulatory discipline is practically non-existent.  Many regulations function as implicit taxes, with far-reaching effects on consumer prices, employment, and innovation.  Yet, nothing in the current process requires or even allows policymakers to make explicit choices about how much of the public's resources regulatory agencies should control, or how regulatory authority should be allocated among alternate uses of the same resources.  Moreover, most regulatory decisions are made by bureaucrats--officials over whom "We, the people" have little, if any, control.  Americans live under a constitutionally dubious regime of regulation without representation.  Section V surveys initiatives reformers have proposed, adopted, or enacted during the past three decades, and identifies two main types: policing reforms and checks and balances reforms.  Policing reforms aim via rules of rulemaking and centralized review to regulate the regulators.  Checks and balances reforms seek to increase Congress's responsibility for regulatory decisions, create inter-agency competition, or foster competition between agency experts and outside experts.  Both types will be needed to make the regulatory system more affordable, effective, and accountable.  Section VI outlines steps to liberate the telecom industry from infrastructure socialism.  Congress should amend the Telecommunications Act to phase out forced access regulation and price controls as quickly as possible.  Section VII discusses several near-term, mid-term, and long-term options for improving the regulatory process.  Because of its complexity and controversial character, the most ambitious long-term reform--regulatory budgeting--is discussed separately, in section VIII.  The most important recommendations for policymakers presented in sections VII and VIII may be summarized as follows: (1) Make agencies compete for the right to score the costs and benefits of their regulatory proposals ... (2) Require congressional approval before rules are effective ... (3) Undertake pilot projects to explore the feasibility of regulatory budgets ... --Competitive Enterprise Institute web site.
Subjects: Law and legislation, Telecommunication, Trade regulation
Places: United States