On the recordJuly 25, 2012
And to my friend from California, she has always been a passionate and very articulate in the battle for resources for the regulators. But I'm going to stand here in opposition to this amendment for a couple of very simple reasons. One, this is already the job they're supposed to be doing with the money they have, this cost-benefit analysis. And we can talk about that further. But also, as you work through the amendment, I have great concern for the law of unintended consequences, and that is, in a weird way, subsidizing and incentivizing bad cost-benefit analysis. In the amendment, it basically says, if you end up in litigation over your cost-benefit analysis, there should be an appropriation, an unspecified amount of money that the appropriators should send you for that litigation. So if you do a really bad job in your cost-benefit analysis and you get sued, you actually get more money that is supposed to be appropriated to you. The sort of constant thing I focus on a lot is that law of unintended consequences of, does it actually create an incentive to draw down more cash for the agency, for the litigation? And the way you get to the litigation is the quality of the work that was done in the cost-benefit analysis. So there are two primary issues: A, this is what the agencies are supposed to be doing; and B, in the design of the amendment, I actually have a concern that ultimately, it may incentivize the very thing we're trying to stop.…
