House Majority’s Last-Ditch Effort to Undermine Public Protections, Award Corporate Giveaways

Jessica Schieder co-authored this post.

With only a few workdays remaining in the current congressional session, House leaders have yet to address many important proposals. However, instead of focusing on the nation’s top priorities, the House majority plans to press ahead with its anti-regulatory, pro-industry agenda.

A major item on the September agenda is a large package of several previous bills that failed to garner support in the Senate. To be floated under a smokescreen of “job creation,” this massive legislative package is nothing more than an attempt to roll back critical public protections and extend tax breaks for big corporations. If passed, the package would undermine important rules that protect the American standard of living, harm our environment, and provide unfair giveaways to corporations.

Re-Emerging Threats to Critical Health, Safety, and Environmental Rules

The House majority’s legislative package includes a long list of damaging bills that have been introduced and voted on many times in the past. Many of these proposals threaten critical safeguards by adding costly and time-intensive procedural hurdles to an already extensive rulemaking process.

Just a few of the most damaging bills that will reappear in this latest attack on health, safety, and environmental protections include:

• The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act (H.R. 367): The REINS Act would require congressional approval of any major rule within 70 legislative days, which is highly unlikely given recent congressional gridlock. Rules that do not gain approval in this timeframe would not move forward, no matter how critical they are to safeguarding our health, safety, or environment. In effect, this bill would delay or block most new safeguards, all without requiring a member of the House to introduce a bill gutting popular laws that promote food safety, clean air, clean water, and more.

  Recent polls have shown that 70 percent of Americans and 64 percent of small businesses support recent efforts to issue carbon reduction rules to combat climate change. Similarly, 51 percent of the public support more rules to ensure companies store chemicals safely, and 50 percent support more safeguards of our public water supplies. Water pollution is also a concern for a majority of small business owners, and 60 percent believe that clean water rules are needed to prevent this pollution.

• The Achieving Less Excess in Regulation and Requiring Transparency (ALERRT) Act (H.R. 2804): The ALERRT Act is a compilation of several anti-regulatory proposals that have previously failed to garner widespread support in both chambers. Among a laundry list of terrible provisions, this proposal would add over 60 new procedural and analytical hurdles to the rulemaking process, such as by requiring agencies to perform an extensive analysis of all direct and indirect costs and benefits of any proposed rule, as well as all potential alternatives, and then choose the “least costly” option, with limited exceptions.

  The bill would also require agencies to provide information about forthcoming rules in a monthly agenda, which would have to be posted online by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for six months prior to the rule taking effect. This would effectively impose a moratorium on all new rules for at least six months.

  Moreover, the proposal would make it unnecessarily costly and time-intensive for agencies to settle lawsuits filed to compel an agency to take an action or issue a rule to protect health, safety, or the environment, as required by law.

• The Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act (H.R. 899): This bill would provide businesses even more access to influence the rulemaking process by requiring agencies to provide them with advance information about rules under development and an opportunity to provide the rulemaking agency with feedback before a rule is even proposed – information and access not available to the public.

  Additionally, the bill would require agencies to perform retrospective analyses of any rules at the request of the chairman or ranking minority member of any standing or select committee of the House or Senate. This would allow members of Congress to send agencies long lists of rules to review, diverting agency staff and resources from working on more critical priorities.

Writing Inefficient Tax Giveaways into Stone

Earlier this year, the House passed several bills to make certain tax breaks for corporations permanent, which would cost the public more than $500 billion over the course of the next decade. These tax breaks ignore both the impact the loss of revenue will have on resources for agencies and programs and will perpetuate unproductive giveaways in the tax code. Nonetheless, the House is expected to consider them before it adjourns.

These provisions include:

• The Research and Development Tax Credit: This tax credit could cost the public more than $150 billion over the next decade. Supporting research is important, but this tax credit is used by the fast-food, cosmetics, and fashion industries, as well as more traditional research scientists. Without fixing the credit to ensure it is applied as intended – and not used to develop a new McNuggett – making this tax break permanent would inefficiently siphon billions from funding for other programs.

• Bonus Depreciation: Making this tax credit permanent could cost the public more than $250 billion over the next ten years. This tax credit’s effectiveness in creating economic activity is mixed at best. It rewards corporations for buying machinery and equipment they need to purchase anyway. It was first made available during the most recent recession to encourage companies to continue buying and, in turn, support the manufacturing industry and other sectors. The tax credit expired last December, and companies have continued to invest. Applying this tax credit retroactively would reward companies for making investments they would have made regardless.

• Section 179 Expensing: The public would lose more than $70 billion over the next decade in order to make permanent tax credits to certain businesses, as described in the America’s Small Business Tax Relief Act (H.R. 4457). These credits allow small businesses to deduct costs including computer software, for example, rewarding them for making investments they would have made anyway.

• The S Corporation Loophole: Classifying a business as an S corporation allows certain business owners to avoid paying payroll taxes toward Medicare and Social Security. A bill passed by the House in June, the S Corporation Permanent Tax Relief Act (H.R. 4453), would permanently provide certain tax benefits to these types of businesses, costing taxpayers more than $2 billion over the next decade.

In the few remaining legislative days this September, our elected officials should concentrate on passing a priority-driven budget and pursuing policies that support America’s workers and their families. This package of recycled, pro-industry legislation would roll back public protections and extend tax breaks for corporations. Instead of placating big donors ahead of the midterm elections, the House majority should focus on serving the best interests of the public.