Issa releases industry letters on 'regulatory barriers' to job creation

By Kathleen Hart

On Feb. 7, as President Barack Obama urged businesses to invest in American companies, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released letters from the business community that point to regulations proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as barriers to domestic job creation.

"The President has recognized the value in examining the regulatory barriers impeding private sector job creation," the committee's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said Feb. 7 in releasing the submissions of more than 100 businesses and industry groups. "This project should complement what President Obama has already called on his administration to do and in concert, lead to a robust and expansive discussion about what the best way forward is to stimulate our economy."

In December 2010, Issa asked businesses to submit a list of government regulations they view as barriers to private sector job creation. Many of the industry groups responding to Issa's request voiced concerns about proposed regulations under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

In a Jan. 7 letter to Issa, the Business Roundtable said the EPA has "unveiled an aggressive Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act regulatory agenda that, cumulatively, threatens a significant number of electric power plants and industrial boilers." The Clean Air Act is "ill-suited to regulate a ubiquitous pollutant like CO2," the group asserted, adding, "CO2 emissions do not pose a local or even national problem; whatever impact there may be is global."

In a Dec. 29, 2010, letter to Issa, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that in recent years, the EPA "seems to have increased both the breadth and the burden of its regulation of the business community. For whatever reason, it has largely spent the past 24 months attempting to modify, re-issue, or re-interpret virtually every controversial environmental regulatory decision of the past decade."

The chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy also released a plan Feb. 1 that it said represents the business community's perspective on how Congress should best pursue new energy resources and streamline energy regulations. The plan, "Facing Our Energy Realities: A Plan to Fuel Our Recovery," resulted from an "Energy Reality Tour" in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found the business community "gravely concerned about the direction of our energy policy."

The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council argued in a Jan. 12 letter to Issa that the general regulatory thrust of the administration on energy and environment "will lead to less energy, higher energy prices, a disincentive to manufacture in the U.S. and massive job loss." Further, the letter charged, "Anti-energy activists in the regulatory bureaucracies seem accountable to no one. Unfortunately, small business owners and their workforce will bear the brunt of higher costs and widespread job loss if initiatives at the Environmental Protection Agency move forward."

"The focus of the aluminum industry concerns are the EPA SO2 National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) and the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) determinations," Aluminum Association President Stephen Larkin said in a Dec. 21, 2010, letter to Issa. "The impact of this standard will be felt on primary aluminum production facilities perhaps necessitating SO2 scrubbers and costing hundreds of millions per facility and threaten dozens of aluminum plants with curtailment."

The American Chemistry Council also cited concerns about EPA's boiler MACT rules. In a Jan. 18 letter, the council told Issa that the rules would "jeopardize some 60,000 jobs and impose capital costs on the order of $3.8 billion in the chemical industry alone."

Issa said his project presents an opportunity for private industry "to put forward detailed and specific examples so that both the American people and policymakers can determine for themselves what actions can be taken to create jobs."