Todd Tiahrt: “And also in that regulation, it is all based on an adversarial system between government and the private sector. One of…”

“And also in that regulation, it is all based on an adversarial system between government and the private sector. One of the things that I look through is how we can improve the relationship between the Federal Government and how they do business with the private sector because everything is set up as an adversarial relationship. The EPA, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency, spends over half of their budget on lawyers. The reason they spend it on lawyers is because they are taking companies to court and suing them, and that means that these companies are spending more of their money just to defend themselves. And we had a very good example happen in Wichita, Kansas about how the government could actually work as an advocate instead of an adversary and still get the accomplished goal completed. I got a call from the Wichita Area Builders Association, and they told me that the home building industry in Wichita, Kansas had been shut down. This was three summers ago. I started looking into it, and I found out that OSHA had targeted that county in South Central Kansas, Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, and they brought all their personnel down there and they started going through all these job sites and writing citations and assessing fines, and everybody just left and went home. And as one subcontractor told me, he said, When I build a house, my portion is very small.…”