White House Rolls Back Regulations

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block. The White House is trumpeting its decision to eliminate hundreds of government regulations. It's part of an effort President Obama started in January to get rid of unnecessary rules.

NPR's Ari Shapiro reports it's also part of an effort to push back against his administration's reputation for being hostile to business.

ARI SHAPIRO: During a rural town hall meeting in Atkinson, Illinois, last week, a farmer named Rod Catchdig said to President Obama, please don't challenge us with more rules and regulations from Washington, D.C.

ROD CATCHDIG: We would prefer to start our day in a tractor cab or a combine cab rather than filling out forms and permits to do what we like to do.

SHAPIRO: The crowd applauded and Republican presidential candidates have been sounding the same theme. Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have all talked about regulations in New Hampshire recently.

MITT ROMNEY: A mass of regulators that are simply out of touch...

Representative MICHELE BACHMANN: What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills, but it's the repeal bill that will get a job killing regulation.

Governor RICK PERRY: Get taxes and regulations back down where they're not stepping on you guys' throats. I don't know what you do.

SHAPIRO: Those candidates, along with the business community, have portrayed President Obama as a big government regulator-in-chief, strangling economic growth. The president is fighting that characterization.

In January, he asked his administration to review all the rules on the books and then made the agencies release draft plans to undo the rules that are outdated, redundant or plain dumb. Now, those plans are final. Cass Sunstein, who oversees the project, spoke to reporters on a conference call.

CASS SUNSTEIN: We haven't had, really, in history, this kind of disdained, presidentially-driven, enhanced process for look-back. There's never been anything of this level of ambition, so we have 801 pages for you and they list hundreds of reforms.

SHAPIRO: The reforms cover everything from transportation to defense to medicine and the environment. In all, the White House says, the savings amount to $10 billion over five years, not to mention piles of paperwork.

Sunstein also expects the rollback to create jobs, though he could not say how many. The business community calls this a good step, but they say the administration is creating new regulations that dwarf these rollbacks, such as the Wall Street reform and health care laws.

Rosario Palmieri is the vice president of regulatory policy at the National Association of Manufacturers.

ROSARIO PALMIERI: We are constantly faced with new additional, we believe, unnecessary burdens that we're attempting to deal with and convince this administration to go forward in the least burdensome way or to not go forward at all when they have that discretion.

SHAPIRO: For example, he points to a rule regulating ozone emissions. President Obama may tighten the standard from the Bush years, even though the rule is not officially up for review until 2013.

Gary Bass of the Bauman Foundation says regulations that keep Americans safe exist for a reason.

GARY BASS: We've tried letting corporate CEOs and politicians police themselves and we paid the price in American lives and in health.

SHAPIRO: He says oil spills, mine explosions and food safety crises are all evidence that the public needs government regulations. And for all the politics surrounding this issue right now, there is some new evidence that businesses are not really oppressed by regulations.

This week, the National Association for Business Economics released its semi-annual policy survey. The group asked 250 economists who work in corporate America how they feel about the current regulatory environment. Eighty percent replied that the state of regulations right now is good for American business and the overall economy.

Rich Wobbekind is the group's president.

RICH WOBBEKIND: It's a good regulatory environment, but most economists want to see, you know, a great regulatory environment. Regulate the things that encourage transparency, but don't regulate the things that slow job growth or just add costs to small business.

SHAPIRO: That seems like a principle everyone can agree on: keep the good regulations, eliminate the dumb ones. Unfortunately, everyone disagrees on which regulations are which.

Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.