January 27, 1976
Page 1110
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, it is my privilege to join today with the distinguished senior Senator from New York in cosponsoring the Congressional Office of Regulatory Policy Oversight Act of 1975.
For several decades our Nation has looked to our Federal regulatory agencies to foster greater competition in the marketplace, to assure the financial integrity of our securities markets, to allocate and regulate the use of broadcast channels and to implement standards for improved environmental quality along with a variety of other functions.
When first conceived, the concept of the Federal regulatory process was to provide independent expert decision making to assure that the public interest was fully represented in the regulation of private business.
The process still is essential to our system of government but the problems have become more complex. Regulation on behalf of the perceived public interest in one sector may fail to provide for equally important public interests in another.
We now recognize that problems of environmental quality cannot be viewed alone, but must be weighed against increasing shortages of energy producing materials.
Only recently the Congress determined that it was no longer in the public interest to house both research and regulatory efforts in atomic energy under the roof of one agency, and we have divided those functions.
Increasingly, we are finding that the regulatory process has other limitations — and those limitations stem basically from a failure to consider the effects of specific regulatory policies on our society as a whole.
While in most instances it is desirable to have an independent policy making body sorting out the complexities of economic regulation, we must not take this process so far from our representative arm of Government that it is no longer responsive to the public will as a whole.
Decisions which have a potential impact on the national economy such as energy policy, or decisions which may chart the communications services available to our Nation for a decade should not be made in the vacuum of the administrative process, but should be brought into the arena of public debate.
That is what this legislation proposes to do. It would establish a Congressional Office of Regulatory Oversight. That office would be responsible to the Congress and would review rules proposed by agencies which the agencies certified as having particular economic or public policy significance.
This process would then allow the House and Senate acting concurrently to reject the proposed rules after consideration of issues which might not have been reviewed within the scope of the administrative agency process.
Mr. President, the Committee on Government Operations, of which I am a member, has this year launched an important review of the Federal regulatory community in conjunction with the Commerce Committee. The product of that study could help shape our national regulatory processes for yet another generation.
I believe the proposal introduced today will be an integral part of any future reforms and support it in the hope that it may help focus the debate on this important issue.