Just days after the administration said it was eliminating hundreds of unnecessary regulations, House Speaker John A. Boehner fired off a letter blasting President Obama for a 15 percent increase in the number of new rules and demanding cost estimates for some of them by the time Congress returns from break.
“This year the administration’s current regulatory agenda identifies 219 planned new regulations that have estimated annual costs in excess of $100 million each,” the Ohio Republican wrote in a letter to Mr. Obama Friday. “That’s almost a 15 percent increase over last year, and appears to contradict public suggestions by the administration this week that the regulatory burden on American job creators is being scaled back.”
Mr. Boehner repeated an earlier request for a list of all new regulations that would have an economic impact of more than $1 billion.
The letter comes on the heels of a White House announcement earlier this week that it had completed plans for a regulatory rollback across dozens of agencies that it said would save taxpayers as much as $10 billion over the next five years. Mr. Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, told reporters the actions — which range from an Environmental Protection Agency initiative to allow hazardous-waste generators to report electronically to a consolidation of various tax forms and requirements by the Internal Revenue Service — would also spur job growth.
Republicans said they were less than impressed by the proposed reforms, and in his letter Mr. Boehner noted that a single proposed EPA rule would cost the private sector as much as $90 billion a year.
• Kara Rowland can be reached at krowland@washingtontimes.com.
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