A provision that would have benefited the public tremendously by enabling Congress to rein in out-of-control, costly regulations was stripped out of the budget reconciliation bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. This was a sad turn of events that hopefully will be corrected in the Senate.
Nearly a decade ago, Congress considered legislation to fundamentally alter how regulations are adopted, defending personal and economic freedom in the process: the Regulations of the Executive In Need of Scrutiny or REINS Act. REINS provisions that were a part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act until shortly before its passage would have put Congress back in the driver’s seat regarding regulations.
The importance of the REINS Act and the efforts to get it passed as part of the reconciliation bill cannot be overstated. Tens of thousands of new regulations are imposed by unaccountable agency bureaucrats each year, limiting individual liberty and choice and increasing costs in myriad, often unrecognized ways. Regulations are hidden taxes that siphon hundreds of billions of dollars from individual households and businesses every year. They represent the largest single fiscal burden on the economy outside of individual and corporate income taxes.
The measure has been misleadingly described as a “wholesale rollback of federal regulations.” In fact, it would merely force Congress to take responsibility for regulations developed by executive agencies to execute the laws it passes.
Under REINS, if Congress disagrees with an agency’s interpretation of what a law requires or imposes, Congress could prevent the regulations in question from taking effect.
The scare-tactics used to vilify REINS inevitably involve a focus on regulations that protect human health and the environment. But many regulations — especially in energy and environmental policy — provide little or no measurable benefits in these areas despite imposing huge costs. The rules are often designed to expand the budgets and power of bureaucrats, creating make-work ventures and guaranteeing lifetime employment for agency staff.
In a craven attempt to evade responsibility, past Congresses found it easy to delegate lawmaking power to executive agencies. Congress took credit for passing vague feel-good laws, only to blame agencies for going overboard, claiming they never intended the resulting onerous outcomes. Congress then publicly assails agencies for going beyond what lawmakers intended but does nothing to correct the supposed overreach.
Recognizing the growing problem of overregulation, in 1996 Congress passed the Congressional Review Act, which granted Congress the power under limited circumstances to review and block major regulations retroactively. The Congressional Review Act, however, has been used to overturn only 20 out of tens of thousands of regulations enacted in the nearly 30 years since it passed — in part because the president is allowed to veto resolutions under that law.
The REINS Act is superior because it reverses this dynamic by requiring congressional approval for all major regulations — an opt-in system, so to speak, instead of opt-out. And under REINS, the president would not be authorized to ignore the will of Congress and its interpretation of its own laws, because no veto is available.
The REINS provisions House Republicans inserted into the reconciliation bill are even more expansive than the original REINS legislation, requiring that any “major rule that increases revenue” be approved through a joint resolution of the House and Senate. The provisions would have also allowed lawmakers to retroactively terminate countless rules that federal agencies have already implemented by requiring agencies to submit them to Congress for review. Rules that Congress fails to approve would automatically sunset.
Also, multiple recently finalized regulations could be rescindedwith a single resolution rather than each individually as the Congressional Review Act requires.
House sponsors had to remove the REINS provisions to avoid letting Democrats filibuster the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the Senate. However, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) reportedly believes he can make some of the provisions pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, so that they can be reinserted and the bill can still pass with a simple majority.
I believe the REINS provisions maybe the single most beneficial law Congress could adopt to get regulators’ boots off the throats of average people and businesses. Congress alone was delegated the power to regulate interstate commerce. It didn’t jealously guard that power before now; it should do so going forward.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.