James Lankford

There has to be a built-in accountability structure.

We are going to continue to over-delegate responsibility, I think, to executive and independent agencies.

The move has been to make these agencies structurally independent from Congress, and that is very dangerous.

They were going to be specialized in their area to be able to get faster, non-political responses.

So at some point, Congress has to admit that post-Watergate process that was created did not work as they hoped it would, and it does have to be reformed.

I would have no issue eliminating that for Unfunded Mandates Reform Act because again, that was a compromise that was made years ago that has proved to be an error.

It is just a lot more comfortable for us to beat up on the agencies than to turn the finger pointing back at us.

But independent from who at that point?

The CFPB, as of now in Oklahoma, 24 percent of our commercial banks no longer do home mortgages.

Just needs to be fixed, that is all it is. Just one little word change.

If we go down this track and the cost is so high and the benefit does not seem to do it, then let us find other alternatives to do it.

By the way, there are some proposals that are floating around now that a group of us have floated on reforming the budget process.

It is just 'did you do everything you said you were going to do'?

We are creating more and more sense that they really are truly independent of everyone, and with no accountability, we have a big issue.

Do we need agents to have better independent agencies anymore, and if we do, how do we reform them?

I think we have lost the why they were created, because they were supposed to be non-political.

It is time for the Congress and the President to take down the artificial and increasingly arbitrary wall that insulates independent agencies from OIRA's review.

Cost benefit analysis, as several of you have brought up, is to inform rather than to check the box and to justify.

Maybe it is time for Congress to actually do its job and provide the lane or the framework for what constitutes things like Waters of the United States.

Congress created them. They are not independent of Congress' oversight by far.

Independent regulatory agencies should be held to the same procedural standards as executive branch agencies.

So I am back to the same issue.

Why? Because that had to be a metric-driven piece, too, that helps us understand how things were evaluated.

That will help us. We want to get a look at some of those analytics and see how things are evaluated so we can also participate just in that conversation, just as good stewards with it.

So a way to be able to guess at this point for the FBI, cases like Mohamed Jalloh, that have happened in the past year where the FBI learns about this individual, self-radicalized online, preparing to actually carry out an attack, and then…