(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Forget about the Obamacare-repeal-and-replace fiasco. The White House wants the media—and all Americans—to pay more attention to its accomplishments under the Congressional Review Act.
You may be asking, “The Congressional Review what?”
The CRA is an obscure 1996 statute that allows lawmakers to get rid of regulations passed by the immediately previous administration. So far, President Donald Trump has signed 11 CRA resolutions sent to him by Congress, knocking out Obama-era rules ranging from a restriction on aerial bear hunting on federal land in Alaska to limits on when the mentally ill can purchase firearms to regulation of pollution from coal mining.
“I think if you take in totality what we’ve been trying to do on the regulatory front, it is a news story,” Marc Short, White House director of legislative affairs, told reporters Wednesday. And he’s right.
The triviality of the bear-hunting-by-helicopter issue notwithstanding, Trump and his sometimes-allies in the Republican controlled Congress have followed through on the president’s threat to roll back a bunch of Obama-era rules. On April 3, Trump signed a CRA measure killing online privacy protections passed last year by the Federal Communications Commission. The regulator had required that internet companies obtain customer permission before using their browsing history and other data to create advertising.
Condemning the CRA roll-backs, Public Citizen, a liberal Washington nonprofit, estimated that corporate interests had originally spent a total of $1 billion opposing the now-canceled regulations. The White House, for its part, estimated that rescinding the regulations would save some $10 billion over 20 years (the sort of projection best assessed with a generous helping of salt).
When Trump on Feb. 14 signed a resolution overturning an Obama regulation that forced oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, it was the first time a president had acted under the CRA in almost 16 years. The only other successful use of the CRA came in 2001, when President George W. Bush vaporized ergonomic protections of workers put in place by the administration of Bill Clinton.
The CRA does have limited scope. It applies to regulations with an anticipated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. And it allows lawmakers to invalidate a new rule only within 60 working days of the regulation’s taking effect. The window for Congress to counteract Obama rules will close roughly at the end of April. Between now and then, Congress has a two-week recess and the not-incidental matter of avoiding a government shutdown.
While the Trump CRA binge is likely nearing its conclusion, it has been, for better or worse, the new administration’s main legislative achievement.
To contact the author of this story: Paul Barrett in New York at pbarrett17@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rovella at drovella@bloomberg.net.
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