John Kerry: “What is going to happen here, Mr. President, is that a process that is supposed to simplify is going to swamp the…”

“What is going to happen here, Mr. President, is that a process that is supposed to simplify is going to swamp the agencies. The EPA currently has a very clear graph that shows how many hours go into rulemaking from business. Business currently spends about 70,000 hours putting together the reports for the process of rulemaking. Under this process, you are going to triple or quadruple the amount of industry input. You are going to at least double the governmental input, and there will be no commensurate increase in resources or budget. The effect will be they will be swamped, because there is a clever little clause in here that says if you do not get your review done in 3 years, we are going to throw the rule out. So first they swamp the agency. Then they provide a whole bunch of opportunities for litigation. And they say if you have not performed your responsibility within that span of time, which is impossible, we throw the rule out anyway. That is stripping America of 25 years of effort to try to have a reasonable process of regulation.”