Orrin Hatch: “I rise to urge my colleagues to take up a piece of legislation that I am sponsoring which has recently passed the House…”

“I rise to urge my colleagues to take up a piece of legislation that I am sponsoring which has recently passed the House of Representatives, the Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act--or SCRUB Act. Federal regulations today impose--by some estimates--a crushing burden of $1.88 trillion on our economy. That is roughly $15,000 per household and more than the entire country's corporate and individual income taxes combined. Excessive and often unnecessary rules imposed by unaccountable Washington bureaucrats strain family budgets and create conditions where small businesses struggle to create jobs. Nevertheless, the regulatory burden keeps growing year after year. The Code of Federal Regulations is now more than 175,000 pages long and contains more than 200 volumes. Since 2008, regulators have added on average more than $107 billion in annual regulatory costs. And as we near the end of President Obama's time in office, Americans should be prepared for a deluge of new rules. As has been widely reported, about 4,000 regulations are working their way through the Federal bureaucracy, with some experts predicting their costs to exceed well over $100 billion. Every President since Jimmy Carter has affirmed the need to review our existing regulations to make sure that they are efficient and no more intrusive and burdensome than is absolutely necessary.…”