Todd Tiahrt: “Yesterday President Bush sent us his budget request for Fiscal Year 2008. This request includes his spending priorities…”

“Yesterday President Bush sent us his budget request for Fiscal Year 2008. This request includes his spending priorities for each federal agency. I applaud his efforts to balance the budget by the end of the decade, and to do so without raising taxes on American families. I also applaud his recent efforts to reduce the burden of agency guidance documents through the Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices that was published on January 25th. In addition to federal regulations, which are burdensome enough, the past decade has seen an explosion in 'guidance documents' that are not legislated but have the same effect as regulation on American employers and can stifle their growth. As OMB itself noted: The phenomenon we see in this case is familiar. Congress passes a broadly worded statute. The agency follows with regulations containing broad language, open-ended phrases, ambiguous standards and the like. Then as years pass, the agency issues circulars or guidance or memoranda, explaining, interpreting, defining and often expanding the commands in regulations. One guidance document may yield another and then another and so on. Several words in a regulation may spawn hundreds of pages of text as the agency offers more and more detail regarding what its regulations demand of regulated entities. Law is made, without notice and comment, without public participation, and without publication in the Federal Register or the Code of Federal Regulations.”