Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, estimates 2,500 regulations put out by the White House over six years have cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars.
Barrasso used a famous controversy over a homemade pond in his home state of Wyoming to illustrate his point.
Andy Johnson and his wife Katie of Fort Bridger, Wyo., ran into trouble with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after damming a creek running across his property to make a trout pond.
{mosads}The agency accused Johnson last year of violating the Clean Water Act and ordered him to restore the creek or face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Johnson stood his ground against the agency and has incurred a massive debt in a fight over federal regulation that has had national political reverberations.
“The Johnsons now face fines for more than $37,000 every day until they remove the pond,” Barrasso said Saturday in the weekly Republican address. “This is what’s happened to government in America. It’s gotten so aggressive, so inflexible and so unyielding — and seemingly for so little purpose.”
Barrasso said the administration is trying to seize new authority by issuing a rule that the administration says will make it easier to identify protected waters and make those protections consistent with the law and peer-reviewed science.
“This includes things like irrigation ditches, isolated ponds — even low points in the landscape where water might collect after a heavy rain,” he said. “The consequences of this new federal authority will be severe. Local land-use decisions will now be driven by Washington bureaucrats.”
He noted that three Democratic senators — Sens. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) — support changing the regulation.
He also cited a new rule for ground-level ozone, also known as smog, which sets the standard at 70 parts per billion, below the previous benchmark of 75 parts per billion.
Barrasso says complying with these regulations has cost the economy $680 billion and forced Americans to spend “millions of hours” filling out paperwork.
Republicans calculate that EPA regulation of power plants cost up to $2,400 for every dollar in direct benefits.
Barrasso pledged that Republicans in Congress will take action later this fall to put legislation on Obama’s desk to “rein in runaway regulation.”
“He will have to choose between big government and hardworking Americans,” he said.