EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011

Mr. Speaker, we've all been back in our districts for the last month, and we've been talking to friends and neighbors back home about what America is truly concerned with, what is most important in the eyes of all Americans, and that is getting America back to work.

Our economy is stagnant. This administration is throwing up barriers, which is freezing assets because the folks that normally would invest in growth and hiring people are frightened about what's around the next corner, and they're sitting with all their money and they're not growing.

I met this morning with around somewhere between 12 and 14 of my neighbors in just a sit-down cup of coffee, where we sat around and we talked about the way that folks in central Texas view what's going on with the job market.

You know, in Texas we've been blessed. We haven't faced the kinds of unemployment numbers that other States have had. But we now are certainly seeing unemployment creeping up in our State also.

We had small businessmen and -women there, and they talked about the things that concern them. But yet we've had meetings with bankers who've explained to us that you can look at their deposits and see that American local investors are sitting on the sidelines and keeping their deposits in the bank and not investing in growth and not investing in capital structure, not building buildings, and certainly not hiring people. And so part of the discussion this morning from some very intelligent small business folks was, we think we know why; why do you say this is happening?

The answers I got were answers that we hear on the floor of this House every day.

But the one that I've been talking about now for almost a year, probably maybe even over a year, is the fact that we are seeing the administration doing through government regulations, which are basically laws passed by the regulators which change the playing field for people and our economy across the board at every level. It's not done by acts of this Congress. It's done by acts of bureaucrats in the Obama administration as they make rules and regulations that fit their view of the world and how they think the world should work. And these regulations regulate the drivers, the force builders that employ the American people.

Many of these regulations have become such a shock to the conscience of people who are in business that they say, ``My Lord, I'm not about to get invested in growth until I know whether I'm going to even have my business once the regulators are through with me.''

And then sitting on the sideline is the giant regulator program, which is the health care bill that this House passed last year and the Senate passed. We call it ObamaCare. Its 2,000 pages are multiplying very rapidly as the regulators, the people who are able to pass rules to set up the regulations that govern that bill, are imposing more and more burden on the individual employer and on those people seeking health care.

So what I heard today from some people who are presidents of small businesses, run small businesses--a Thomas Barrett, a very intelligent lawyer who is both a financial adviser and a lawyer for small and other sized businesses all over central Texas and is highly sought after for his opinion--they said it's the unknown that's driving the investment off the page in the United States. It's the unknown. We don't know what's going to happen next. Our taxes. What are taxes going to do? We've got taxes that will last for a while and then go back to a different tax automatically unless this House acts.

Then most importantly, and what we talked mostly about today, was all the new regulations that are coming up.

In the next 3 or 4 months, the Republican leadership in this House is going to do everything it can to turn back some of the craziness that's gone on in the regulatory world. I brought the Members here tonight just a few examples of some of the regulations, many of which we've been talking about all year. We've spent a lot of time talking about the cement industry; we've talked about Boiler MACT; we've talked about a lot of other things we're going to talk about tonight.

But it's just a general outline of some corrective measures that this Republican-led House is going to try and going to pass through this body to just start slowing down and changing the direction of what we think are some ill-conceived regulations by the executive branch, the Obama administration.

I want to start off with this poster right here, which just gives you a small example of what we're talking about. In July of this summer-- this is what we've called the ``regulatory summer''--these are regulations that have been proposed by various agencies. Many of them are household words like the Environmental Protection Agency; but there are plenty of others, the Labor Department--you could go on and on.

In July, 229 proposed regulations went into effect, 379 final regulations, and the cost estimated of these proposed and final regulations: over $9.5 billion to the economy in the month of July. That meant business, the job creators, took a hickey of $9.5 billion in 1 month, the month of July 2011. We have just finished August--270 proposed regulations, 347 final regulations: over $8.2 billion in August. So for this summer, just July and August, the 2-month total: $17.7 billion in costs to the people who create jobs.

Now, is it any wonder that the people who create jobs are sitting on the sidelines and saying, holy cow, how do I hire somebody? And I think the American people know why people in business hire somebody. They hire somebody because they think that person will make their business more prosperous, will make it work more efficiently, will make it do the job the business was set up to do. If you are in the roofing business and you put roofs on houses, you hire more roofers because you think you will be able to produce a better quality product faster and more efficiently, therefore enhancing the profit that those who have invested their capital and labor into that business--they can make a profit so that that business can thrive. You don't hire roofers when you don't need to put roofs on houses. I mean, that doesn't make any sense, and everybody with any kind of common sense knows that.

Now, if you've got a person who's got some business, whether it be big or small, and they literally don't know what the government is going to do to them tomorrow or, let's just say, in the next 2 months, following this track record, they could be looking at another almost $20 billion worth of additional costs to their business that could be coming up in September and October. Based upon the last 2 months, it's arguable that it's pretty close to $20 billion of additional costs that they were not anticipating and never thought was going to happen to them; and all of a sudden out of the clear blue, it drops in their lap.

Now, you will hear arguments like, wait a minute, there are these things that are environmental and other ways and people have known all along something about this was going to be done. And that may or may not be true. But the ramifications of what the regulators actually did are turning out to be horrendous costs to industries that right now are trying to get the ground under them stable so they can start hiring people again.

If you're on balancing ground sort of like this earthquake we had up here in Washington, which I am very fortunate that I wasn't in, when that ground is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Well, the same thing goes for business. When the foundation underneath your business is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Are you going to go out and hire somebody, give them a job, when this is what your life is right now and someone is creating that problem, that are actually by their actions making it unstable?

I would argue that questionable regulations, the imposition of additional costs, the unknown of what taxes are going to be tomorrow-- all these things create an unstable environment for the people who hire people. So this last regulatory summer is a perfect example of the earthquake that has shaken the foundation of the small businessman and the job creators in America.

The President of the United States promised us, the White House promised us, to save $10 billion in redtape, which is kind of the slang term for bureaucratic regulations, in 5 years. But the White House has put forward $17.7 billion worth of redtape in 2 months. The message has been lost somewhere. Where is it? When did what we were promised change into a three-for-one worse situation? We were promised a $5 billion savings for the job creators; and, in fact, we've created a $17.7 billion expense and uncertainty to the job creators, and we wonder why we are not creating jobs.

Mr. Kucinich was talking about his view of the world. He and I don't see

the world the same way, but the facts are when he was talking about we need to create jobs, we darn sure need to create jobs.

The role of the Congress today is finding ways to get this country back to work. If we put this country back to work, 90 percent of our problems will be much, much better. So the real goal of the Republican House this year, to finish this year out, is going to be trying to correct at least some of this instability created by these regulators, these unelected regulators. These are appointed people, not elected people. The heads of these agencies are appointed by the President. They are under the wings of the White House, if you will. They are part of the executive branch of government. And the legislature, this branch, the Congress, is going to, in the next several months, try to put some reins on these out-of-control regulators and hold them back. And we've got just some of them I am going to talk to you about that some of my colleagues are putting forward in the future.

The week of September 12, which is next week, I suppose, we're going to take up the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, by Tim Scott of South Carolina. Now, the facts of this situation are very unusual in my way of thinking, and I think most of the people in the United States, when they heard this on television, they said, they can't do that, can they?

It seems the Boeing Corporation has a big operation up in the Washington State area, and they were wanting to build an additional plant to build whatever Boeing builds, whether it's aircraft or whatever it is--they wanted to do it in South Carolina. They have been negotiating and working in good faith with the citizens of South Carolina and the government of South Carolina. They have looked at alternative locations around the country to make a determination of what is best for their business in their situation today, and they determined that they were going to build a very important plant in South Carolina.

But the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, issued a complaint against the Boeing Company for the alleged transfer of an assembly line from the Washington plant to South Carolina. Yet not one union employee at the Boeing's Puget Sound facility, that's the Washington plant, has lost his or her job as a result of the proposed South Carolina plant.

Still, the NLRB is pursuing a restoration order against Boeing that would cost South Carolina thousands of jobs--these are new jobs in South Carolina--and deter future investment in the United States. This is the government telling Boeing how they can run their business at the base level of you can't move unless we tell you you can move; and if you choose to go to a right-to-work State instead of a union shop State, we're going to tell you, no, you can't do it.

What happened to the freedom of movement that our Founding Fathers created in this country? I mean, part of what makes us great is if you can't prosper in Texas, you can maybe prosper in South Dakota. In fact, people are right now, as we talk right now, people are taking businesses from one part of the country and going to another part of the country because of maybe newly discovered resources, maybe a better work environment, maybe a more intelligent workforce, maybe a better investment community, maybe better opportunities, maybe better tax structure. That's the free right of every American, is seeking prosperity for their company and for their family to go seek these places.

If we're going to tell Boeing they can't build a plant to create jobs in South Carolina, next they may be telling Sam Smith in Oklahoma, I'm sorry, but we need you to stay in Oklahoma, we don't want you to move to Texas, or we don't want you to move to South Carolina to go to work in the Boeing plant, which we just canceled. Is that the kind of world we have and we want this government to have? I would say no.

Do we want the people of South Carolina to have 1,500 new jobs? Yes. Is anybody talking about hurting the people employed at Puget Sound? No.

It's the issue of union membership that drove this whole thing, and we have given our States the right to choose whether they have a right- to-work State or they have a union State, and every State in this country has some difference in how they view that. It's part of the environment that State creates to bring business into the community.

What in the world is wrong with that, and when did that become Big Brother's job to tell somebody where they can and can't offer you a job? So are we now saying that the people of Washington State--and I have many friends there and I love very much, and I don't mean to be in any way defaming Washington State--but we have got a group of bureaucrats that are saying those are more important people than the people in South Carolina who want to work for Boeing for a good salary, because the government's telling them they can't do it.

The gentleman from South Carolina, Tim Scott, has got this bill, H.R. 2587, we're going to take it up next week, I understand, which is going to protect these jobs from this government interference. It would take the common-sense step, and it would prevent that National Labor Relations Board from restricting where an employer can create jobs in the United States.

Who would have ever thought we would have had to even address this on the floor of this House? This world that we have lived in, and, in fact, President John F. Kennedy in writing one of his dissertation papers at Harvard came up with a term ``The Great Frontier,'' which the whole concept of America was if you failed in one place, the great blessing of America is you can pack up and move to another place. At one time that was the frontier.

Now that frontier is in technology; that frontier is in science. That frontier is not just moved from one place to the other; it's moved from one idea to the other. That's the greatness of America. To have the government tell you where you can and can't locate is an abomination to the very spirit of the American Dream.

This one, we need to do it right away; we are going to do it. We hope our friends in the Senate are going to help.

We have the administration's new Maximum Achievable Technology Act, MACT, standards and Cross State Air Pollution, CSAPR, for utility plants, will affect electricity prices for nearly all American consumers. In total 10,000 power plants are expected to be affected. I can't tell you the number in other States, but Texas surprisingly fell under this act, which no one anticipated, and we actually had no input whatsoever--but that's a different argument which I have made before, but I know that we are talking about 17 to 19 plants just in Texas are being closed down.

These are coal-powered plants. We're talking about coal-powered plants in most instances here. The result to middle class America is an annual electricity bill increase in parts of the country anywhere from 12 to 24 percent, just by this one regulation that has been proposed dealing with coal-powered plants and greenhouse gas emissions. Well, Representative John Sullivan of Oklahoma has come up with a solution for this, H.R. 2401, the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation.

One of the things that we think any regulator should be looking at as he is doing this type of work is how does this impact the jobs of the American people, how does this impact the economy of the area. If you have a State that has 20 power plants and the results of your mandatory and arbitrary ruling is going to shut down 12 or 15 of those plants, it doesn't take a genius to figure the price of electricity is going up.

Even if they go in and they make a conversion to some other form of power at great cost and expense, billions of dollars of additional money happen to be spent, even if they do that, you are still going to have down time when electricity is going to be scarce and the risk of blackouts and brownouts is going to be increased. Quite honestly, it hurts every industry and every person that depends on that electricity.

Has anybody looked into this and said here is how we figure this out and told us with transparency what effect this has? No.

So what Mr. Sullivan is trying to say is that we need to call a time- out;

and it would require a cumulative, economic analysis for specific environmental protection rules and specifically delay the final date for both utility MACT and CSAPR rules until full impact of the Obama's administration regulatory agenda has been studied.

Some of this stuff is done with computer projections, but the facts are it's kind of a shock and surprise to everybody that's in the business, and it's time that we call time out and rather than cost this country jobs, give these people a chance to continue to have good jobs for the American people to work in.

This is a good bill, and we're going to take this bill up the week of September 19.

The next bill that this Republican Congress is going to go take up is H.R. 2250 to deal with what's called boiler MACT. From hospitals to factories, colleges, thousands of major American employers use boilers that will be impacted by the EPA's new boiler MACT rules.

These new stringent rules will impose billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs, increasing the costs of many goods and services. College kids will tell you how expensive going to university is today. They don't need any more cost increase there, but it will increase the cost of higher education; and it will put over 200,000 jobs at risk, just what they have done under the boiler MACT rules.

So what are we doing with H.R. 2250? Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia has proposed this. It's called the EPA Regulatory Relief Act and would provide a legislative stay for four interrelated rules issued by the EPA in March of this year. The legislation would also provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new achievable rules that do not destroy jobs and provide employers with an extended compliance period.

In other words, if it's a problem, let's fix the problem without costing people jobs. Let's fix the problem with a reasonable amount of time for compliance so that it's not a knee-jerk reaction that is required by everybody to try to keep from going out of business because of EPA-imposed rules.

So basically, just like the last bill we talked about, this is saying stop this craziness, take a new look, let the people you're regulating have some input into the cost and the compliance and the job loss, and then let's restructure. If we've got to fix this problem, restructure it in a manner that makes common sense to keep the American men and women of this country working, keep the factories open and producing and the colleges and universities open and producing and not impose a short-term, heavy burden of an additional capital infusion in order to meet regulatory changes. Give them a reasonable amount of time that common sense says it would take to fix the problem instead of imposing this rammed-down-your-throat series of rules. October 3 is the week the Republican Congress will be bringing that before the American people and before this House.

This is one I've been working on for quite awhile. I hope through part of our efforts during these evenings when we've talked about the cement MACT issue, the imposition of new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions for the cement factories, and the fact that we've had the opportunity to very effectively drive cement production out of this country and offshore to China, India, and maybe Mexico where they don't regulate at all the emissions, and then we think that somehow it's going to fix greenhouse gases. It's kind of insane that cleaning it up over here and driving people offshore to where they don't clean it up at all is going to help anything. It's going to hurt something, but that's a different argument.

In the week of October 3, the cement MACT and two related rules are expected to affect approximately 100 cement plants in America. The cost is estimated to be somewhere between $3-4 billion for a $6-8 billion industry. Just do the math. That's a tremendous burden if these rules come into effect. These stringent requirements will be cost prohibitive, and the American cement industry, quite frankly, could be at risk across the board. We could wake up finding ourselves importing from other countries, by necessity, a product that we now lead the world on.

You know, concrete is the second most used building material on Earth. The only thing that's used more than concrete is water. So Portland cement, which is the base ingredient in creating concrete, is as important to the building of infrastructure buildings, and basically everything that we live with, as anything on Earth. And we are in that business and we produce cement in various States in this country. We produce the Portland cement process, and these regulations would shut down factories and basically cause these international companies-- because all companies, whether they are based here or not, trade internationally--to move someplace else. And you wonder why jobs are going overseas. Well, in this case, in the cement industry, jobs will be going out of the country for one specific reason--government regulations beyond reasonableness.

The Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act sponsored by Representative Sullivan, my good friend from Oklahoma, will provide a legislative stay of these rules--hold off, brother, we need to look at these things--and provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new, and here's the magic word, achievable rules that do not destroy jobs and provide employers with an extended compliance period. Once again, quit cramming it down our throat. Quit saying you've got to do it tomorrow. Give us time to implement reasonable rules. And as we look at these rules, let's analyze what they are going to cost us in the way of jobs and in the way of our economy, and take that into consideration as you plan out the reasonable way forward. You'll find that many of the things that we'll be taking up in the next couple of months, right there is the secret key ingredient. We're going to come up with rules that you can achieve without destroying jobs that will still, over a long term, if you give time to comply, will meet the requirements that are necessary that people think to clean things up if they need to be cleaned up.

October 3 is when we are going to take that up. Sometime in the month of October or November we will take up another bill.

Oh, by the way, when you're talking about jobs in these Portland cement factories, these jobs are good jobs. These are labor jobs, but they are trained labor jobs. They are good jobs that pay somewhere between $65,000 and $85,000 each. Now, that's a good American job that ought to be done by an American, not by someone from China or from India because we have driven these industries out of our country.

Coal ash. H.R. 2273, these are anti-infrastructure regulations commonly referred to as coal ash rules that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, according to the existing regulations, affect everything from concrete production to building products, like wallboard. The result is an estimated loss of well over 100,000 jobs.

So, you know, at the end of this last month, we had no job gains. Not one job was created. That's what the report said. Well, just in the things that I've read to you so far as a result of these regulations, if all of this took place next month, just the numbers we've given, we're talking about 500,000 jobs so far that these bills that this Republican Congress is going to take up and try to get some reasonableness in this regulatory process.

It's time for this Congress to not surrender the lawmaking-- rulemaking is lawmaking--authority to regulators without overseeing what they are doing and making sure that they are not harming our economy and harming what is going on in America and the jobs that everybody needs. We can't afford to lose more jobs. We have to keep the people working who have jobs, and then we've got to enhance these businesses in such a way that they feel that they are not going to be threatened by surprise regulations; and, therefore, they are willing to say, I have got stable ground under my feet and I can start to expand and hire again and start to invest my capital which right now is sitting in the bank into new and better products, services, factories, et cetera.

So this coal ash bill that will cost this country 100,000 jobs, H.R. 2273, the Coal Residual Reuse and Management Act, sponsored by Representative David McKinley of West Virginia, will

create an enforceable minimum standard for regulation of coal ash by the States, allowing their use in a safe manner to produce products and protect jobs. It's just basically saying let the people who have this coal ash--and it's in certain States more than other places--use this coal ash and regulate this coal ash in such a manner that it does enhance the environment without destroying American jobs.

Once again, the Congress has got to act, and the Republican Congress is prepared to act.

Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is now proposing rules to regulate dust. Now, I live in Texas. We've got more highway miles than any other State in the Union, plenty of paved roads, but we've also got what we call farm roads and ranch roads. And in the western part of the State, those farm roads are covered with what we call caliche, which is a pulverized limestone, and over in the eastern part, they're covered with certain types of gravel. Some of it's river gravel and other things.

When a farmer drives up to his house on his driveway, it's usually got some kind of gravel or caliche on it and it kicks up dust. The EPA is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your gravel road. Now, what is your solution? Well, it's easy. Go out and spend $20,000 and pave your driveway--5 miles of driveway. So put pavement on it. Oh, but make sure you put a certain kind of pavement because it's got to have pavement that doesn't kick up dust. Arguably, if you use asphalt, it won't kick up dust, or concrete won't kick up dust--or not as much--but you might kick up a little more dust if you do what they call ``squirt top,'' which is what most farm roads are, which is tar with gravel spread on it. Until that gravel sets, it kicks up dust.

So even if you went to the expense to build a farm road that was a paved farm road, your paving method might kick up enough dust to get them to fine you and take money out of your pocket anyway. And the EPA now wants to regulate dust. California does this already. I asked one of my California colleagues, How do you keep from getting fined in California while having the dust regulations? Here's what they said: Water down your roads every day so it doesn't have dust. Mud is okay. Dust is bad.

Okay. Now that may be great for California. I don't know what the water situation is in California. But it hasn't rained in Texas. Some kids are about to go off to school and haven't seen rain in Texas, it hasn't rained so long. But seriously, I landed at the airport and looked out at this waterfall up here on the east coast, and said, Holy cow, we don't know what that looks like back home. Why don't they move all this water on the east coast down to Texas, where it hasn't rained, to my knowledge, in 6 months. And half of my neighboring county of Bastrop is burning to the ground because it's so dry and so hot, and we haven't had a rain in so long. We may be the only State in America that's praying that a hurricane will hit our coast so we can get some rain.

Are you going to tell that farmer that the only way he's getting that water that he's feeding his animals is through shallow wells that may have gone dry on him, or deep wells he has to drill to get to additional water under the ground, or windmills that are pumping that water, if you are out West, which are not that deep, and a lot of them have gone dry--his precious water that his livestock and his family needs to survive, he's got to take it out and squirt it on his road so he can get home at night?

Now, does that make economic sense to the American people? I don't think so. But then if you sit in the big EPA building in Washington, D.C., and have never even seen one of these roads and probably never been outside this Beltway, it may make perfect sense to that person in this paved world that we live in inside the Beltway. But it doesn't make sense to the average person that's trying to make a living all across the rural parts of the United States. And not just rural, but all across the United States where, unfortunately, we kick up dust. By the way, plowing kicks up dust. So then you can only plow when the fields are wet. Did you ever plow when the fields are wet? The only person who would sit in the EPA office and think that the farm products magically appear at their grocery store would know that you can't get off in a muddy field and plow effectively. Yes, you can turn up some moisture at the right time, and you can keep dust down, and farmers do. They don't want their top soil blowing away like it did in the Dust Bowl. They've learned their lesson about that, and they're doing the best they can, and I would commend them for doing it.

I went to school in Lubbock, Texas, back in the 1960s, at the end of what we call the Dust Storm era. And because of modern farming methods and so forth, they still have dust storms up there, but they're nothing like what they had in the fifties, nothing like what we had in the sixties, and I would argue that because of good modern farming methods, we keep the dust to a minimum. But we still sometimes have half the State of New Mexico blow through the panhandle of Texas.

Now, who are you going to fine? The State of New Mexico? The New Mexico farmers? The Texas farmers where it lands? Who's going to be responsible for all that dust that's out there in the air? Well, the EPA says somebody is, because they set regulations, and that would be a violation of these regulations. The biggest shortage of anything in this town is common sense. This is the most nonsensical rule of anything that's come down.

One of our new freshman Congressmen, Kristi Noem, is a smart lady. She knows rural America. She knows the ridiculousness of this set of EPA rules. She's come up with a farm dust bill which we will take up this winter to make EPA start using some common sense. The President was asked a question about this in one of his meetings here recently at a town hall. He sent this farmer on a bureaucratic wild goose chase and he never got anything in return. So as a result of that, that farmer, his efforts which--that wild goose chase produced nothing that was satisfactory--Representative Kristi Noem of South Dakota has H.R. 1633, which would protect American farmers and jobs by establishing a 1-year prohibition against revising any national ambient air quality standards applicable to coarse particulate matter--that's dust--and limiting Federal regulations of dust which are already regulated under State and local laws. In other words, let the States take care of it.

Let me tell you something. This is not one of those Texas brags. We had dust storms when I went to school where girls didn't wear dresses in the spring because it would pick up pea gravel the size of a dime with those 60-mile-an-hour winds coming across the plains and it would blow that gravel so hard against their bare legs, if they had on dresses it would literally cut them off if they tried to walk to class. Now that's an act of God. Nobody created that wind. And certainly pea gravel is about as big a particulate matter that would be flying around anywhere. But the Federal Government doesn't control the wind, and it never will. We've got to get some reasonableness back into what's going on.

Finally, because I've been talking about this now for over a year, and in my office we are tracking every regulatory agency, and every day we're seeing new and bizarre concepts of what we need to do from regulatory agencies--we're seeing bugs shut down major highway projects. When the President laughed and he said he learned that shovel-ready jobs are not really shovel-ready jobs, he should have gone on to tell you why many of those shovel-ready jobs weren't shovel ready, and it was because of regulations created by the regulatory agencies that stopped legitimate road and bridge projects that were funded. I have one in my district right now that is funded and the dozers are on the ground, ready to move, and that project is shut down by one of these many, many regulations. It's the same across the country.

We can't do today what FDR did. It's great to talk about what FDR did. I don't think it accomplished a whole lot in getting us out of the Depression, but that's my opinion. But the facts are you couldn't build a Hoover Dam today. Just up and go out there and start building a Hoover Dam. My Lord, just to build an electric power plant,

the number of regulatory agencies and permits that you would have to have would cover the walls of this Chamber before you even get to break ground. I've seen those rules put on walls. It's an amazing number of rules. We are a world of government control of everything. That's what these regulatory acts are about.

Finally, this Congressman, John Carter, because of looking at this stuff now just for the last year or so, I really and truly think the best thing we can do to give the stability to the employers who employ people is to basically ban the implementation of any new Federal regulations from now through January 31, 2013, guarantee a 2-year window for businesses to hire without any fear of new costs from regulations, and certain exceptions would be allowed for the military or foreign affairs or internal agency management and personnel rules. So they'd still be able to have regulations that fit in those categories and make sure that we keep our foreign operations and our military operating. They have to make rules to operate under. We would exempt those particular things. But the rest of them, we would say: Timeout. Continue your studies. Continue your discussions. I would encourage you to extend an arm out to business to say, This is what we're looking at. Let's hear what you think.

Let's start putting ourselves together with the idea that people are part of this environment, too.

People are really what makes up this country. Without people, we're just a barren land. People, to live, need to have a job, and the people who create jobs need to have a reason for hiring people and giving them a job. People who have ideas--the great driving force of America, the new idea. We just have so many examples of new ideas just in the high- tech industry and the communications industry, the revolution that has taken place just in the last 10 years of new ideas. Those new ideas come from the freedom to think and the belief that you can take that idea and put it into reality without somebody stepping on your toes and preventing you from doing it.

These regulations and this control from Washington, D.C., this cradle-to-grave mentality that seems to be running inside this beltway and the creation of these regulatory rules is putting the brakes on our economy and putting fear in the hearts of American entrepreneurs and businesspeople and employers who want to make their business better by hiring those good people that we're graduating from our colleges and universities, those good people that are trained in trained skills that we need to put to work in America, and we'll put them to work in real jobs, not government-created jobs with borrowed money but real jobs that produce something and create wealth and make us and continue to keep us the most prosperous Nation on Earth.

It doesn't come from government; it comes from the people. The people are the wealth of this Nation--their ideas, their entrepreneurship, the investment of their own personal capital, and their willingness to take a risk on America because they know America is great. And to people who don't think we're great or think that they're smarter and can be inside this beltway and make rules that can do a better job of telling you how to run your life or how to drive home on your farm road than you know, I say, Get out of the way.

That's what this fall is going to be about. We're going to be bringing these things up. And these are things that are going to be discussed and talked about and voted on this fall because we Republicans believe that the right path to create jobs and create wealth in America is to get the regulators to start thinking in terms of creating jobs, not destroying jobs; enhancing businesses, not negating businesses; and to put America back to work.

And if we put America back to work, all the rest gets better: the debt goes down; the tax revenues go up; the country has more to pay back the people we owe, which ought to be our first priority. We can get our financial house back in order. We can get our credit rating back that was taken away from us, and we can start operating like America has always operated. The business of this country is business; and as much as that was criticized back in the twenties, that statement is true today just like it was then. It's the American people that give the American people jobs, not the government.

Let's put the brakes on these regulatory things. We're going to do that this fall. I look forward to it. Pay attention to it. Members of this House and anyone around the country who has an interest, pay attention to it. Give us your input because we are bound and determined to level out and stabilize that playing field that business creates jobs on so that we can put America back to work.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

I rise today to support my amendment. I call my amendment ``Can We All Get Along?'' It is an amendment simply to ask that all of those who are impacted by this proposed legislation have an expanded time to be able to present their views.

It is a ``can we all get along?''-type amendment because it is important to note again that those of us who come from different States, whether it's Illinois or Texas, recognize that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act were formulated under a bipartisan Congress and were signed, as my colleague reminded us, by President Richard Nixon. Republicans and Democrats voted for the Clean Air Act and for the Environmental Protection Agency's jurisdiction.

It's important to note that there is not only a value in what the EPA does but that there are organizations, such as the American Lung Association, the American Thoracic Society, the Physicians for Social Responsibility, the American Public Health Association, and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, which need their input and are concerned about this legislation.

So my concern as we move forward on the transparency and regulatory analysis of impact is how much time has been given for the public comment. My State, in fact, has been impacted for the lack thereof of public comment. I believe that there are civilians who are not businesses who should be protected and given the opportunity to have input.

For example, it's important to note that the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, which I don't think my colleagues can in any way dissuade me from believing, has been the basis of preventing 17,000 premature deaths, 11,000 heart attacks, 120,000 cases of aggravated asthma, 12,000 hospital and emergency room visits, 11,000 cases of bronchitis, and 850,000 missed days.

The idea of putting a superlayer over the already existing regulatory

scheme, to me, sounds like we are adhering to the supercommittee concept, which many of us, by way of absolute necessity, voted on during the debt ceiling debate; but we realize that the responsibility of the purse strings is in the United States House of Representatives. Well, the law has given authority to the EPA and to the Clean Air Act as its authorizing aspect to be able to control and balance.

I believe we should create jobs; but the question becomes whether or not the TRAIN Act, in the format of adding another layer of review, actually does that--or does it create another level of bureaucracy that we neither want nor need? At a time when these regulations will both decrease health costs and can create thousands of jobs, why would my colleagues propose a bill that would only slow job growth?

It has been 260 days. I think we should, as I started out, get along, try to create jobs, recognize the value of the EPA, find a way to be able to resolve the present conflict on the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule but not eliminate the authority and the oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency.

What I would say to my colleagues is that the EPA has protected all of our constituents. Therefore, I think it's important to pass this amendment because it's about constituents. It's about constituents no matter what side of the aisle they're on. This is an amendment that moves the public comment from 90 days to 120 days. There may have been some who wanted to comment who cannot comment because they did not have the amount of time.

So I would ask my colleagues to support this ``can we all get along?'' amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Let me indicate to the gentleman first of all that I thank him for accepting the amendment, and I conclude my remarks by saying that my asking for a roll call vote is not in any way a reflection of my lack of acceptance, but I am just so gratified for this timeframe that I hope that the gentleman will encourage those to support the amendment.

Therefore, let me say to the gentleman--I finish on this note--there is some thought that we are putting in another regulatory scheme, but I think the important point from my perspective is that there was value when Richard Nixon signed the bill on how do we find a way to make this work so that we save lives and we create jobs.

I think my amendment provides the opportunity for that kind of input, and I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Chair, I rise today in support of my amendment #4 to H.R. 2401, ``The Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act,'' which extends the public comment period from 90 days to 120 days.

The Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation (TRAIN) Act establishes a committee to conduct studies and review the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations based upon the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard Rule (MATS) and the Cross State Air Pollution (CSAP) Rule promulgated. This committee is composed of Administration officials from different federal agencies and under H.R. 2401 will analyze the effect of the regulations on the economy, U.S. competitiveness in the global market, employment, and energy production and cost. In effect this is creating more regulations and more bureaucracy at time when Republicans are calling for all of us to tighten our belts. So now before us is a Super Committee for the Budget and again we are going to have a Super Committee for Clean Air. We already have an agency charged with protecting our air. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been up to the task for 40 years. According to the EPA, the pollution reductions required by the rule they have proposed will yield health benefits of $120 to $280 billion per year, which is 150 to 350 times the cost. I have always been a stalwart for a firm balance between the needs of the energy industry and our environment. But then there is just plain common sense. The TRAIN Act goes overboard. It is a extreme response that does not add value to ensuring Clean Air.

The argument proposed by some of my colleagues has been that this will cost jobs. Implementing regulations will create jobs. Old power plants and other utilities will have to hire workers in order to fulfill the requirements of the regulation. The EPA has determined that this will not be overly burdensome to the industry. We as a body must ensure that the regulations issued by the EPA will not destroy any industry but at the same token TRAIN is too extreme. It creates the very bureaucracy that we neither need nor want. At a time when these regulations will both decrease health costs and can create thousands of jobs, why would my colleagues propose a bill that will only slow job growth. It has been 260 days and the Republicans, who have been in the majority, have not presented a clear and consistent job growth package. Instead time and time again they have put forth measures to cut Medicare and social security at a time when so many of our constituents are dependent upon those resources to cover health costs and living expenses.

The TRAIN Act, which I could easily consider a bill like a steam train and it steams right through the power of the EPA to regulate clean air, requires that the committee publicly publish its initial findings and then provide the public with 90 days to comment. If this flawed bill is going to pass at least my amendment is an attempt to take into account the number of interested parties who may wish to give their input and extends the public comment period from 90 days to 120 days. I have offered this amendment to ensure that everyone who wishes to comment will have ample opportunity to do so.

My home state of Texas was not initially included in the Cross State Air Pollution Rule. When my state was added, there was no time provided for public input, a courtesy that was extended to the other 6 states included in the Cross State Air Pollution Rule. Stakeholders throughout Texas were afforded no opportunity to discuss the impact of including Texas at the last minute. Had there been opportunity for public comment, the EPA and stakeholders would have been able to work together towards a consensus.

The proposed regulations have different impacts on different stakeholders, and it is extremely important that everyone's point of view is considered. An open dialogue that encourages frank and productive communication can foster compromise.

As the Representative for Houston, the country's energy capital, I am committed to creating an environment in which the energy industry and regulating agencies can work together.

For more than 40 years the EPA has been charged with protecting our environment. There has been a consistent theme of chipping away at the ability of the EPA to protect our air. We have to consider the long term costs to public health if we fail to establish reasonable measures for clean air.

Outdoor air pollution is caused by small particles and ground level ozone that comes from car exhaust, smoke, road dust and factory emissions. Outdoor air quality is also affected by pollen from plants, crops and weeds. Particle pollution can be high any time of year and are higher near busy roads and where people burn wood.

When we inhale outdoor pollutants and pollen this can aggravate our lungs, and can lead us to developing the following conditions; chest pain, coughing, digestive problems, dizziness, fever, lethargy, sneezing, shortness of breath, throat irritation and watery eyes. Outdoor air pollution and pollen may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma. There are serious costs to our long term health. The EPA has promulgated rules and the public should be allowed to weigh in to determine if these rules are effective.

The purpose of having so many checks and balances within the EPA is to ensure that the needs of industries and the needs of our communities are addressed. Providing a time for individuals to support or oppose any regulations is a meaningful first step. This bill is a step in the wrong direction.

The EPA has spent years reviewing these standards before attempting to issue regulations. In terms of the Mercury and Air Toxics

Standard (MATS) Rule the new standard will significantly reduce mercury and toxic air pollution from power plants and electric utilities. The EPA estimates that for every year this rule is not implemented, mercury and toxic air pollution will have a serious impact on public health. Think for a moment about the lives that can be saved. We are talking about thousands of health complications and deaths. What more do we need to know. According to the EPA this rule would prevent the following: 17,000 premature deaths; 11,000 heart attacks; 120,000 cases of aggravated asthma; 12,000 hospital and emergency room visits; 11,000 cases of bronchitis; and 850,000 missed work days.

The second rule that is targeted by this bill is the Cross State Air Pollution (CSAP) Rule. As a Representative from the State of Texas, I have a few reservations about the rules implementation in my home state; however, the rule can be more fairly implemented.

This rule will significantly cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions released into the atmosphere. The regulation impacts 27 states where power plant emissions cause poor air quality that affects neighboring states. It is important to know that the EPA designed this rule again by keeping the lives of our families, our children, our communities and the environment in mind. According to the EPA this rule when implemented will prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 heart attacks, and 400,000 cases of aggravated asthmas.

Sometimes we can get caught up in the numbers and forget the people behind each. If these rules are allowed to be implemented there are 51,000 more people who will be able to spend another day, week, month or year with their families. These are our friends and family members who with the implantation of these rules can enjoy another cup of coffee.

The prolonged or indefinite delay of these life saving regulations threaten the very air that Americans, our constituents, breathe. I cannot speak for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, but I certainly do not want to repeal regulations that protect the 18th Congressional District's access to clean air.

The analysis required by this legislation is focused solely on the impact of EPA regulations on economic competitiveness, fuel prices, and employment without taking into consideration the public health benefits of the regulations. The Mercury and Air Toxics Standard Rule will significantly reduce mercury and toxic air pollution from power plants and electric utilities.

The Cross State Air Pollution Rule will significantly cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions released into the atmosphere. The regulation impacts 27 states where power plant emissions cause poor air quality that affects neighboring states.

My amendment will not affect the intent of the bill; it merely ensures that should this ill conceived measure pass that there is plenty of time given for our constituents who live in states affected by mercury and toxic pollution and cross state air pollution to weigh in on the public health aspects of these regulations.

I have offered this amendment not only to benefit those who live in states that would be affected by these regulations, but also to ensure that the industry being regulated has ample time to provide their input. Throughout my tenure in Congress, I have worked tirelessly to foster better relationship between the energy industry and regulating agencies. With an open dialogue and productive communication, we can forge compromise that will protect the environment without harming economic growth, and the intent behind this amendment is to do just that.

As the Representative of the 18th Congressional District of Houston, Texas, I can attest to the importance of a healthy energy industry. My district is the energy hub of Texas and is recognized worldwide for its energy industry, particularly for oil and natural gas, as well as biomedical research and aeronautics. Renewable energy sources--wind and solar--are also growing economic bases in Houston.

I understand the economic impacts of regulation, but we must also act responsibly. We cannot ignore the public health risks associated with breathing polluted air, nor can we pretend that these emissions do not exacerbate global warming. Alternatively, we certainly do not want to hinder job creation and economic growth.

Lest we forget that since 1999, Houston has exchanged titles with Los Angeles for the poorest air quality in the Nation. The poor air quality is attributed to the amount of aerosols, particles of carbon and sulfates in the air. The carcinogens found in the air have been known to cause cancer, particularly in children. The EPA is the very agency charged with issuing regulations that would address this serious problem. This bill may very well jeopardize the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, our public lands, and our public health by deep funding cuts in priority initiatives.

The least that can be done is to extend the opportunity for the committee formed by this bill to hear the concerns of the public. I am sure this will certainly go a long way to encourage robust discussion on health, job creation and economic improvements without putting the environment or the American people at risk.

I encourage my colleagues to support the Jackson Lee amendment in order to strike a balance between the EPA and the energy industry, forge compromise that will protect the environment without harming economic growth by extending the public comment period from 90 to 120 days. My amendment does not change the intent of the bill, it creates the opportunity for communication and consensus.

September 21, 2011.

Dear Representative: On behalf of the undersigned public

health and medical organizations, we write to state our

strong opposition to any efforts under consideration by the

U.S. House of Representatives that hinder the Environmental

Protection Agency's (EPA's) ability to protect health through

the implementation the Clean Air Act.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor's August 29, 2011 memo to House

Republicans specifically called for passage of bills

including H.R. 2401, which would indefinitely delay the EPA's

proposal to reduce mercury and other toxics from power plants

and would block implementation of the Cross-State Air

Pollution Rule, a finalized rule that is expected to prevent

the premature deaths of thousands of Americans each year and

to make it easier for states downwind of pollution sources to

achieve healthful air for their residents. The memo also

signals plans with H.R. 2250 and H.R. 2861, which would delay

EPA efforts to reduce mercury and other toxics from

industrial facilities and cement plants. Further, it signals

plans to thwart EPA's ability to propose a health standard

for particulate matter, calling for passage of HR 1633, a

bill that would block the completion of the review of the

health effects associated with deadly soot or particulate

matter and prevent EPA from even proposing a standard and

receiving public comment on that standard.

We urge you to oppose this plan and ask that you, instead,

support protecting public health. This Rep. Cantor-led effort

would impact EPA's ability to implement the Clean Air Act: a

law that protects public health and reduces health care costs

for all by preventing thousands of adverse health outcomes,

including: cancer, asthma attacks, strokes, emergency

department visits, hospitalizations and premature deaths. A

rigorous, peer reviewed analysis, The Benefits and Costs of

the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020, conducted by EPA, found

that the air quality improvements under the Clean Air Act

will save $2 trillion by 2020 and prevent at least 230,000

deaths annually.

Additionally, the public supports EPA's efforts to

implement and update the Clean Air Act. A recent bipartisan

survey, which was conducted for the American Lung Association

by the Republican firm Moore Information and Democratic

polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research indicate that

those pushing riders or otherwise interfering with EPA are

out of touch with voters. The survey shows that over seventy

percent of voters do not want Congress to stop the EPA from

setting stricter pollution limits and sixty-six percent of

voters would prefer that EPA set pollution standards, not

Congress.

We believe that in an ironic twist, the Majority Leader's

memo lays out an agenda that will expose the public to levels

of air pollution that can make them sick or kill them. This

agenda will certainly drive up health costs for all as people

continued to be exposed to life-threatening air pollution. We

ask you to support full implementation of the Clean Air Act

and oppose all efforts to weaken, delay or block progress

toward the continued implementation of this vital law.

Sincerely,

American Lung Association.

American Thoracic Society.

Physicians for Social Responsibility.

American Public Health Association.

Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, colleague, and fellow Floridian for yielding the time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise today in opposition to the rule for H.R. 2250. In my considered opinion, both these bills are yet another effort by the Republican leadership to demonize the Environmental Protection Agency while doing nothing to create jobs for the millions of Americans who are unemployed.

My colleague Mr. Nugent, my friend, cited the letter, the authors of same being Walter Minnick, Robert Aderholt, G.K. Butterfield, and John Shimkus. I signed that letter. I was not the author of same. I do not deny any of its particulars, specifically the fact that there should be flexible approaches to address the diversity of boiler operation, sectors and fuels that could prevent severe job loss.

I would remind my friend that the measure that we were speaking of is under a stay and, therefore, the implementation of the provision will continue, I believe, to allow for the needed flexibility.

And I think you referred, and I refer again, to the portion of the joint bipartisan letter:

``As EPA turns to developing a final Boiler MACT rule''--mind you, they had not, and this was as of August of last year--``we hope you will carefully consider sustainable approaches that protect the environment and public health while fostering economic recovery and jobs within the bounds of the law.''

That is precisely what I signed on to and stand by, and I don't believe that it is inconsistent with anything that my friend pointed out nor did he suggest that it would be inconsistent.

But I did also hear my friend talk about Washington doublespeak, and I distinctly heard him refer to what has now kind of perpetuated itself inside this beltway, and that is the statement that was made earlier by the distinguished Speaker of the House of Representatives that ``at this moment the executive branch has 219 rules in the works that will cost our economy at least $100 million. That means under the current Washington agenda, our economy is poised to take a hit from government of at least $100 million.''

I would ask my colleague to not follow on that pattern; otherwise, you get caught in the Washington Beltway doublespeak. The better proof allows an analysis that was done by The Washington Post, and I'm not a follower necessarily of The Washington Post Fact Checker, but so far I've not heard anyone reference them.

They do give people Pinocchios for when something is not the truth. It's either one Pinocchio, two or three. As it turns out, what the Washington Post said following the Speaker's comments that you have used here today, my dear friend, is that Mr. Boehner left the distinct impression that 219 new regulations were hanging like a sword of Damocles over the U.S. economy; but it turns out the number of potential regulations is inflated as well as the potential impact. Overall, his statement contains significant factual errors, and they give it three Pinocchios. I would urge that you not try to earn these Pinocchios that they're talking about, and let's try to get the facts straight.

Just last week, we were having this very same discussion about a bill that made it easier for power plants to emit

harmful mercury and other toxic pollutants into the air. Today, we're talking about letting industrial boilers and cement kilns do the same thing. Last week, I asked, Why is it that certain ones can follow the standards and that others can't? I still am puzzled by that. I also asked last night how it is if we don't know what the rules are going to look like that we would be smiting down, if there is such a word, the rule.

Mr. Speaker, we are judged by what we do and not by what we say. What my friends on the other side of the aisle continue to do is to call up bills that are shortsighted and undermine our ability to maintain the public health and cleanliness of our air and water. Bills like these that destroy regulations protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink have the same consequences regardless of intent. Republicans cannot close their eyes to these effects and plead good intentions.

I assure you these effects are severe. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that does, in fact, hinder brain development in infants and children. Other toxic metals getting a pass under these bills are arsenic, chromium and lead, which are known to cause cancer and birth defects.

Despite these facts, my friends on the other side cling to their anti-regulatory dogma with fanatical fervor. I had a friend last night say to me that some people have a conscience and brain and that others just think about dollar signs. I feel that my colleagues who have brains--I believe they have consciences--seem to place the dollar signs ahead of many of the practical matters that would benefit society.

This anti-government rhetoric has gone so far as to lead my colleagues on the other side astray of the protocols laid out by Majority Leader Cantor. In the third protocol laid out in his Legislative Protocols for the 112th Congress, Leader Cantor writes:

``Any bill or joint resolution authorizing discretionary appropriations shall specify the actual amount of funds being authorized. Authorizations shall not utilize terms such as `such sums as may be necessary' or similar language that fails to specify the actual amount of funding being authorized.''

Yet neither of these bills specifies how much money is authorized for the implementation of the bill, leaving the cost a mystery. Furthermore, ambiguous language in these bills will create legal uncertainty and ensure litigation. Since these bills don't specify how much they cost, neither bill contains an offset for the cost. These bills also defy Leader Cantor's fourth protocol that we know around here as CutGo. There will be a real cost for the EPA to take on another lengthy rule creation process, but my friends on the other side have chosen to ignore this contradiction.

Mr. Speaker, these bills are not just bureaucratic infighting. They will have real and measurable effects. According to EPA's analysis, H.R. 2250 would result in a significant number of premature deaths, in a significant number of additional heart attacks, and in considerable numbers--more than 100,000--of additional asthma attacks that otherwise could have been avoided.

Likewise, H.R. 2681 would cause tens of thousands of adverse health effects, including the premature deaths that are suspected and the heart attacks and additional asthma attacks that otherwise could have been avoided.

The reason I didn't use EPA's numbers is I don't think EPA or anybody else has the prerogative to make a decision about how many people are going to die at a certain time. That said, it does not mean, however, that one person is not going to die, and it does not mean that one person is not going to have asthma. My position is one death that could be avoided is too many, and one asthma attack, if you've been around children who have them, is too many if they could be avoided.

In light of these estimates, these bills appear to be nothing more than another attempt to purge any government intervention related to keeping our air clean and environment safe.

Consider that these regulations the Republicans say are destroying jobs have not even gone into effect. The Boiler MACT rules dealing with industrial boilers, as I, along with my colleagues, wrote to EPA, are currently in an administrative state while the EPA reviews industry- provided data. That's why we sent the letter during that period of time--to ask them to please consider the diversity, as I continue to do, of boilermakers in this country.

We don't even know what those rules are going to look like; yet the Republican gut reaction is to oppose them. Or consider that the cement rules have been finalized for a year already. Most cement plants are already in compliance, and those plants that aren't are working with the EPA to get in compliance.

Mr. Speaker, based on what I've seen by the Republican-led Congress, it is clear to me that they have no intention of using their power to create jobs. I heard my colleague, my friend, say that the President's administration is not about the business with the so-called, he said, American Jobs Act. I don't know whether it would create a single job or not. We wouldn't know it until it passed, and it isn't going to be passed here in the House of Representatives because the agenda that you've laid out is an agenda that's going to attack the EPA as if they are some horror show here in this country and not an agenda, as you heard in the one minutes this morning and as you've heard from the Democratic leadership repeatedly, to bring up the Jobs Act, to put it on the floor, to let it be debated under an open rule, and to do what's necessary for us to create jobs.

The history of the Clean Air Act shows that its benefits--longer lives, healthier kids, greater workforce productivity, and ecosystem protections--outweigh the costs by more than 30 to 1. I continue to remind my friends that the Clean Air Act was implemented under the Richard Nixon administration, and it has been in existence for 40 years. This country has experienced ups and downs during that period of time insofar as its economy is concerned, and said regulations haven't caused all of the economy to collapse.

Otherwise, during the period when Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton and those of us who were here balanced the budget, we wouldn't have been able to do it if the Clean Air Act were all that bad as you all are pointing out in your continuous attack against the EPA. In the time since the act was passed, air pollution has been reduced by more than 60 percent while the gross domestic product of the United States grew by more than 200 percent.

Furthermore, an EPA economic analysis found no indication that any cement plant would close due to the cement rules. At most, the analysis at this point indicated that 10 underutilized plants would go idle temporarily while waiting for economic conditions to improve.

However, if we can get the economy back on track and restore the demand for cement, then those plants will not have to go idle. We need to focus on creating customers and restoring demand. I heard that from my colleague saying that's what he hears from businesspersons, I hear that same thing, that they need demand and that they need customers. We need to make it easier for them to do that and not easier for the suppliers to pollute.

You know what's a great way to create more demand for concrete? Invest in infrastructure projects that use concrete for roads and bridges, the very same proposals called for in the President's Jobs Act.

If Republicans are so concerned with the concrete plants shutting down, you should work toward helping these businesses sell more concrete. Making it easier for them to pollute does not provide underutilized plants with new customers.

In the midst of an economy still suffering the effects of the greatest recession in a generation, the only answer my friends on the other side seem to have is to dismantle any government regulation intended to protect our Nation's public health and environment. This, Mr. Speaker, is economic extremism.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I guess it's my prerogative to assist in correcting a couple of measures. I kind of wish my good friend--and he is and he's going to be a real asset to our institution as an institutionalist, and I'm referring to my friend, Mr. Woodall from Georgia. He and I enjoy quite a tete-a-tete in the Rules Committee. It's just that when he puts forward his proposition, I wish he had that same fervor with all of the closed rules we have had in the House up to this time. One-half of all of the rules we've promulgated until today have been under closed rules. This one is a modified open rule. And, yes, you're correct, Members can come down and they can go forward if yesterday they knew today that they had to meet by the close of business the amendment process.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Woodall).

Absolutely.

Reclaiming my time, I can't agree that this one is done right, but it's a modified open rule. It's not an open rule, and you know that as well as do I.

But more important, I want to refer to my good friend from Florida as well when he said that CutGo is not applicable in this particular situation. I disagree. And I think what needs to be understood by my colleague, Mr. Nugent, is we don't make these rules here in the House. The protocols have been established early on, and we don't say what CBO needs to do. I think all of us are in agreement that CBO is a nonpartisan requirement, a group that estimates for us what would be the net cost of legislation.

In this particular measure that we are considering, H.R. 2681, CBO estimates that implementing H.R. 2681 would have a net cost of a million dollars over the next 5 years. The cost of this legislation falls within budget function 300, natural resources and environment.

Now then, I repeat the protocols enunciated and promulgated by the majority leader, Mr. Cantor: any bill or joint resolution which authorizes the appropriation of funds for any new agency, office, program activity, or benefit shall also include language offsetting the full value of such authorization through a reduction in the authorization of current ongoing spending.

Now, that just is not happening here. And CutGo, although applicable, is being waived, I guess.

At this time, I'm very pleased to yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Oregon, my good friend and classmate, Mr. Blumenauer.

I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I would just remind my friend that when plants like he referenced are closed, it doesn't mean that the demand is not still there. And what happens is it means that new plants are being built. And guess what happens when you build new plants? You use steel, you use cement, and you have jobs. So I'm not certain that analogy that he put forward holds in that case.

I would tell my friend from Florida to know that I have no further speakers at this time and I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Nugent and I are from Florida. The largest supplier of energy-- electricity, specifically--in Florida is a company known to him and me as Florida Power and Light. Mr. Nugent probably does not remember that I ran for the Public Service Commission in the State of Florida to deal with regulatory matters and to address the ongoing concerns. And much of what we talked about at that time, in addition to two lawsuits that I had filed in my community, was about coal-fired electric generating plants.

Florida Power and Light, being an extremely responsible energy producer, has taken upon itself to eliminate much of their coal-fired activity. And in spite of all these regulations and their alleged uncertainty and everything having to do with it, they now are using gas-fired facilities and working on trying to reduce emissions, period, and have no problems. The largest electricity producer in this country is Exelon, which has no power. They come from Mr. Shimkus', the gentleman that just spoke, territory in Illinois. That's where they're based, and they have no concerns with complying with these regulatory matters.

Now, one thing I heard about cement being imported, the reason for that is the low demand. And if my Governor and some of these other Governors would get off the dime and go about the business, and if this Congress was to go about the business of implementing the infrastructure provisions that are offered in the Jobs Act of the President, then we would use more cement, and we wouldn't have to get any from anywhere as we have not in the past when the economy has that kind of demand.

For people who believe in the Republican anti-government, ``the EPA is the evildoer of the world'' doctrine found in many of these bills-- and I might add we will see more of this according to the majority leader--we are going to demonize EPA, those 17,000 employees. I found it ironic that someone commented a minute ago that they have enough staff in order to be able to do it, while at the same time every time we look to cut some agency, we are cutting EPA, and many people in the Republican Party have used as their mantra the elimination of the EPA.

So I don't know that they could offer any kind of regulation on the Clean Air Act or anything else. But I offer to them these suggestions: If you don't like regulation, don't drive on roads; don't fly; don't go to national parks; don't worry about listeria in cantaloupe and lettuce; don't worry about mercury, chrome, cadmium, and other toxins that pollute the air and cause our children to have asthma. Just don't do that. Don't have any regulations. Just go about your business. And we would then find ourselves in mass confusion with people with premature deaths that are unnecessary.

We can do this. We can have a conscience and a brain and we can make money in this country. We've done it in the past; we will do it in the future.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this rule and on the underlying bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

This week is Dirty Air Week in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, in the Energy and Commerce Committee, we considered legislation that will increase emissions of mercury and other dangerous chemicals from industrial sources. Today the full House considers legislation to cut the heart out of the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Speaker, this is the most anti-environmental House of Representatives in history. Since February of this year, the House has voted again and again to block action to address climate change, to halt efforts to reduce air and water pollution, to undermine protections for public lands in coastal areas, and to weaken the protection of the environment in other ways.

My staff prepared a database last month on every anti-environmental vote in this Congress. The tally was 125--125 votes to weaken clean air, clean water, safeguards to make our drinking water less safe, to weaken environmental standards in dozens of different ways. This is an appalling and dangerous environmental record. The full database is online at democrats.energycommerce.house.gov.

Today the assault continues on the Clean Air Act. The bill we consider today, the TRAIN Act, will block and indefinitely delay two EPA rules that reduce pollution from power plants: the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule and the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. These rules are critical to protecting the public health. Each year these rules will prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths, tens of thousands of heart attacks, and hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks. They will also prevent over 2 million lost workdays. If this legislation is enacted, these public health benefits will be lost, and more babies will be born with birth defects and learning disabilities.

And this is not all. Today we will consider amendments offered by Chairman Whitfield and Representative Latta that will make this bill even worse. The Whitfield amendment will eviscerate the law's ability to require power plants to install modern pollution controls.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told us this morning that if the Whitfield amendment is enacted, EPA will never be able to issue a rule to prevent emissions from power plants in one State from polluting the air in a downwind State. She also said that the amendment could destroy the agency's ability to ever reduce toxic mercury emissions from power plants.

The Latta amendment is even worse. It will reverse 40 years of clean air policy, repealing the health-based standards that are at the heart of the Clean Air Act. The Latta amendment would allow our national goals for clean air to be determined by corporate profits, not public health.

These radical amendments were never examined in hearings or debated in the Energy and Commerce Committee or in any other committee. Members are being asked to vote on major changes to the Clean Air Act without any idea of their terrible impact on air quality and public health.

My Republican colleagues will argue that we need to gut the Clean Air Act because it is a job-killing law. That is categorically false. The last 40 years proved we could have both economic growth and a clean environment. We do not have to choose between jobs and toxic mercury emissions that endanger our children's health and poison our lakes.

The rules that are being overturned are job creators. If these rules are allowed to go forward, the utilities that operate our oldest and dirtiest power plants will have to install new pollution controls. This will create 1.5 million jobs by 2015. This bill puts these jobs on the chopping block.

I urge all Members to oppose this legislation and protect the Clean Air Act.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased at this time to yield 5 minutes to the distinguished ranking member of the Energy Subcommittee, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rush).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased and honored to yield 5 minutes to one of the strongest environmental champions in the House of Representatives, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to my fellow Californian, an important member of the Health Subcommittee, the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. Chairman, before I yield, I want to indicate that Mr. Whitfield just argued that this bill will not harm public health because although it blocks two critical rules to clean up old power plants, it doesn't repeal the Clean Air Interstate Rule, or the CAIR rule. Well, leaving an inadequate rule in place does not achieve the health benefits lost by blocking the Mercury Air Toxics Rule and the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. The CAIR rule was blocked by the courts. They found it didn't comply with the Clean Air Act because it did not effectively address pollution that crosses State lines. That means that States suffering from up-wind pollution have to look for additional, more costly, pollution reductions from smaller local sources; and it does not require power plants to clean up mercury and other toxic air pollution. His statement was absolutely incorrect.

At this time I want to yield 3 minutes to a very important member of our committee, Ms. Schakowsky from the State of Illinois.

I yield 5 minutes to the gentlelady from the State of Colorado (Ms. DeGette).

Mr. Chairman, my colleague, Mr. Whitfield, just said that the EPA found that the mercury reduction benefits were so insignificant by EPA. Well, what they found was they couldn't put a pricetag on the avoided birth defects and brain damage to babies. If that's insignificant, I just think people ought to put this whole effort to deregulate the efforts to protect the environment in perspective. I think the Republicans think it's insignificant because we can't put a dollar figure on birth defects and brain damage to an infant--and so many Republicans call themselves pro-life.

I want to yield 5 minutes to the distinguished chairman of the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee who has fought so hard to protect environmental regulations, especially those that protect the public health, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. Chairman, I want to set the record straight because I think we're getting a lot of false information. We are told that this bill doesn't weaken any existing law. That's not correct. The Cross- State Rule has already been finalized, which means if you are living in an area where pollution's coming from another State, and there's nothing you can do about it, the State that's causing the pollution has to reduce that pollution in order not to affect you. And that's going to be repealed by this legislation that's before us.

We're told all that's going to happen is we're going to delay some of these rules. Well, yes. We're going to delay the rules. And then Mr. Whitfield is going to offer an amendment to make sure that EPA can never adopt any of those rules.

And the thing that just galls me is the statement that the benefits from reducing mercury are insignificant. Well, EPA was unable to quantify or monetize all the health and environmental benefits associated with the proposed toxic rule, but EPA believes these unquantified benefits are substantial. We are talking about impaired cognitive development, problems with language, abnormal and social development, potential for fatal and nonfatal heart attacks, association with genetic defects, possible auto-immunity effects in antibodies. This is not insignificant. And I think that it's not accurate to tell us that this bill simply provides some transparency. I think the authors of the bill ought to provide us a little bit more transparency.

I at this point want to yield 6 minutes to my good friend, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. Chairman, the Republican spinmeisters like to come up with slogans. So they've come up with the slogan ``job-killing regulation.'' Well, let me tell you what we're talking about: children- killing pollution.

And I just think that when we hear the statements that they're not going to weaken or delay any rules that protect public health and the environment, we shouldn't take their word for it.

I have a letter here from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. They represent the State and local air pollution control people who are on the ground every day working to improve the Nation's air quality. What they say is that if this bill is adopted it ``will create regulatory delays that could lead to thousands of premature deaths, remove important regulatory tools upon which States and localities depend, impose additional costs on government as well as small businesses, create regulatory uncertainty, cause job losses, and defund an important and cost-effective air pollution control program.''

Mr. Chairman, at this time I want to yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from the State of Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to correct some of the statements that have been made. The gentleman from Oklahoma talked about the clean air in his area. That's fine. They have attained the standards for protecting public health. But there are a lot of other areas where they don't have that attainment of health-based standards.

Market forces alone will not correct problems that hurt our public health and the environment. Why should any business spend money to install pollution control devices if they don't think their competitors are going to do the same thing? So government must establish some standards so that everybody knows what the rules are going to be and the investments will be made.

Approximately two-thirds of the coal-burning power plants in this country have the up-to-date controls in those power plants. What we're talking about for the most part are those third we were told were going to be retired. But they're not being retired. They're still being used, and they're still polluting. And those power plants ought to come up to compliance with the reductions in their emissions.

One of the other speakers on the other side of the aisle said we don't have a real economic analysis of all of these regulations. That's not true. There are thousands of pages of economic analysis before these regulations have been promoted.

Another person on the other side said a lot of these rules are so onerous that they should be blocked because we're going to be threatening the reliability of the Nation's electric grid by causing these old, inefficient power plants to put modern pollution controls on them. Well, that's not the testimony that we received on September 14, 2011, in the Energy and Commerce Committee where Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff took a different position, as did FERC

Commissioner John Norris, and former DOE Assistant Secretary for Policy Susan Tierney. A stack of independent analyses confirmed that these protections that will require controls on these power plants will not threaten the reliability of our grid.

And over and over again we've heard unless we adopt this TRAIN Act, we are going to lose jobs. Well, the TRAIN Act blocks and indefinitely delays two of the most important clean air regulations of the past few decades: the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which are, again, directed at those power plants that emit toxic air pollutants, including mercury and carcinogens; and then the other rule is the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule to reduce power plant emissions that cause pollution problems in downwind States.

I don't believe they're telling us the facts when they say we're going to lose jobs. The truth of the matter is, according to the Economic Policy Institute, they reported in June that the Air Toxics rule would have a positive net impact on overall employment, creating up to 158,000 jobs between now and 2015.

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts released a report showing that the utility investments driven by the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Air Toxics rule would create nearly 1.5 million jobs by 2015.

Moving toward a cleaner, more efficient power sector will create capital investments such as installing pollution controls and constructing new capacity. These new investments create a wide array of skilled, high-paying jobs.

And I must say to my Republican friends, if we want to create jobs, let's pass the President's jobs bill. I'd like the Republicans not to block every effort by this administration to create new jobs in this country.

There are numerous groups that are on record in opposition to the TRAIN Act. Obviously, the public health groups are opposing the bill: the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Thoracic Society, and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. The American Public Health Association called this ill- conceived legislation that would prevent EPA from protecting the public's health from dangerous and deadly air pollution. The National Association of Clean Air Agencies, the ones that are doing the job of protecting our environment, groups that represent millions of Americans, particularly all of the environmental groups, oppose this.

Scientists have told us--and I know a lot of Republicans deny science--but scientists, I think, are to be respected. And they say sacrificing tens of thousands of Americans' lives will not create more jobs. Poisoning the air our children and our families breathe will not stimulate the economy.

Three hundred sportsmen organizations representing our Nation's hunters, anglers, and the businesses that depend on our wildlife and natural resources support EPA efforts to cut mercury pollution and strongly oppose any efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act.

The Evangelical Environmental Network opposes these efforts to block the Mercury and Air Toxics rule because they point out that in the developing brains of fetuses and children, this will cause learning disabilities and neurological problems, and is not something that people who claim to be pro-life ought to support.

The Obama administration opposes this TRAIN Act. They threaten to veto this legislation if it reaches the President's desk. Americans don't support weakening the Clean Air Act or blocking EPA's efforts to reduce dangerous air pollution from power plants.

I think, my colleagues, that this TRAIN Act and some of the amendments that are going to be added to it are reason enough to oppose this legislation, and I urge opposition to it.

I am going to reserve the balance of my time if the gentleman, the chairman of the subcommittee, is not ready to close on the legislation.

The EPA did an economic analysis looking at the cost and benefits. And on the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, they said that the costs would be less than a billion, but the benefits would be up to $280 billion per year, 150 to 350 times its cost.

I want the chairman of the subcommittee to answer a question when he closes. I believe the Republicans have misrepresented this bill during the debate, but false information was put on their Web site tonight. They claimed hundreds of groups support the TRAIN Act, and immediately two groups came forward, and maybe others will as well, saying that they would never support the TRAIN Act--Clean Water Action Committee and the Clean Air Watch.

I'd like to know if the information that is on the Web site is being checked for accuracy, because I know that a lot of things that have been said in this debate from the other side of the aisle have not been accurate.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. President, as Congress continues to debate ways to reduce our national deficit, some Members of Congress are taking the time to reflect on the state of the Federal tax system and consider how we can simplify it and make it more efficient and fair. Today, as part of that effort, I along with my colleague Senator Begich are introducing legislation aimed at simplifying and modernizing the existing system for filing Federal tax liens, a key tool used by the Treasury to collect unpaid taxes. The bill has been endorsed by Citizens for Tax Justice, Tax Justice Network, Public Citizen, US Public Interest Research Group, and the FACT Coalition, an organization of public interest and business groups concerned with tax fairness.

It has been 45 years since Congress has made any significant changes to the laws regulating how the Internal Revenue Service, IRS, files Federal tax liens. Right now, outdated laws are forcing the IRS to waste taxpayer dollars on an old-fashioned, inefficient, and burdensome paper-based filing system spread out over 4,000 locations that should be replaced by a modernized electronic filing system capable of operating at a fraction of the cost. It is time to bring the Federal tax lien system into the 21st century. The Tax Lien Simplification Act, which we are introducing today, will simplify the process of recording tax liens at an estimated ten-year cost savings of $150 million, while at the same time improving taxpayer service by making it easier to verify lien information and speed up the release of liens after taxes are paid.

Tax liens are a principal way to collect payment from persons who are delinquent in paying their taxes. By law, Federal tax liens arise automatically ten days after a taxpayer's failure to pay an assessed tax. The lien automatically attaches to the taxpayer's real and personal property and remains in effect until the tax is paid. However, the tax lien is not effective against other creditors owed money by the same taxpayer, until a notice of the Federal tax lien is publicly recorded. Generally, between competing creditors, the first to file notice has priority, so the filing of tax lien notices is very important to the Government and to the taxpaying public if taxes are to be collected from persons owing taxes.

Current law requires the IRS to file public notices of Federal tax liens on paper in State, county, or city recording offices around the country, to ensure other creditors receive notice of the government's claim. There are currently more than 4,100 of these recording offices, many of which have developed specific rules regulating how such liens must be formatted and filed in their jurisdictions. This patchwork system developed more by default than by plan, as different offices developed procedures for filing a variety of legal documents affecting title to real and personal property.

In 1966, to help the IRS comply with a proliferating set of filing rules for Federal tax liens, Congress passed the Tax Lien Act to standardize certain practices. This act provided, for example, that liens against real estate had to be filed where the property was located, and required each State to designate a single place to file Federal tax liens applicable to personal property. Most States subsequently adopted a version of the Uniform Tax Lien Filing Act, enabling the IRS to file a notice of tax lien in each locality where the taxpayer's real estate is located, and a single notice where the taxpayer resides to reach any personal property. For corporations, States typically require the IRS to file a notice to attach real estate in each locality where the real estate is located, and a separate notice, usually at the State level, to attach other types of property. There are often additional rules for trusts and partnerships. The end result of the law was to reduce some but not all of the multiple sets of rules regulating the filing of Federal tax liens.

The bottom line today is that, in most cases, tax liens have to be physically filed in one of over 4,000 recording offices. In most cases, that filing is accomplished by mail, using paper documents. Some jurisdictions also allow electronic filings, but those jurisdictions are few and far between. The same is true if a lien has to be corrected, or a related certificate of discharge, subordination, or nonattachment needs to be filed, or when a tax liability has been resolved and the IRS wants to release a lien. Each action usually requires a paper filing in one or more recording offices and requires the additional involvement of third parties. If a paper filing is lost or misplaced, the IRS often has to send an employee in person to deal with the problem, adding travel costs to other administrative expenses.

The paper filing system imposes similar burdens on other persons dealing with the tax lien system. Any person who is the subject of a tax lien, for example, or who is a creditor trying to locate a tax lien, is required to make a physical trip to one or more recording offices, which may not even be in the same State as the taxpayer, to search the documents, see if a lien has been filed, and verify or examine the information. Currently, there is no single database of tax liens that can be accessed by any taxpayer that is the subject of a federal tax lien, by any creditor, or by any member of the public. Not even IRS personnel have access to such a tax lien database. It does not exist.

The result is an inefficient, costly, and burdensome paper filing system that can and should be completely revamped. Businesses across the country learned long ago that electronic filing systems outperform paper; they save personnel costs, material costs, time, and aggravation. Government agencies have learned the same thing as they have moved to electronic databases and recordkeeping, including systems made available to the public on the Internet. Among the many examples of government-sponsored, Internet-based systems currently in operation are the contractor registry operated by the General Services Administration to allow persons to register to bid on federal contracts, the license registry operated by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the public to search radio licenses, and the registry operated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to allow the public to search currently registered patents and trademarks. Each of these systems has saved taxpayer money, while improving service to the public.

Just as government agencies gave up the horse and buggy for the automobile, it is time for the IRS to move from a decentralized, paper- based tax lien filing system to an electronic national tax lien registry. But the IRS' hands are tied, until Congress changes the laws holding back modernization of the federal tax lien filing system.

The bill we are introducing today would make the changes necessary to enable the IRS to take immediate steps to simplify and modernize the federal tax lien filing system. The operative provisions would require the establishment of a national registry for the filing of tax lien notices as an electronic database that is Internet accessible and searchable by the public at no cost. It would mandate the use of this system in place of the existing system of paper filings. It would establish the priority of federal tax liens according to the date and time that the relevant notice was filed in the national registry, in the same way that priorities are currently established from the date and time of a paper filing. The bill would also shorten the time allowed to release a tax lien, after the related tax liability has been resolved, from 30 days to 20 days.

To establish this new electronic filing system, the bill would give the Treasury Secretary express authority to issue regulations or other guidance governing the establishment and maintenance of the registry. Among other obligations, Treasury would be required to ensure that the registry was secure and prevent data tampering. Treasury would also be required to work with industry and other potential users of the registry to develop accurate search criteria to identify persons who are the subject of a tax lien. In addition, prior to the implementation of the national registry, the Treasury Secretary would be required to review the information currently included in public tax lien filings to determine whether any of that information should be excluded from disclosure on the Internet. For example, the Treasury Secretary would end disclosure of social security numbers that are currently included in some tax lien filings.

While such identifying information could continue to be included in a tax lien filing to ensure that the filing is directed toward the correct person, the registry could be constructed to prevent such information from being disclosed publicly and instead provide such information only upon request from appropriate persons involved in the enforcement of the tax lien or collection of the tax debt. By requiring this information review prior to implementing the national tax lien registry, the bill would provide greater privacy protections for taxpayer information than occurs in current tax lien filings.

To ensure a successful transition to the new system, the bill would require the Treasury Secretary to establish one or more pilot projects to be carried out within 2 years of enactment of the bill, and require a successful nationwide test of the tax lien registry before it can be made operational. The bill would also allow the IRS to continue to use the existing paper-based tax lien filing system, in parallel with the new system, for an appropriate period to ensure a smooth transition.

Moving to an electronic tax lien filing system using an Internet- based national registry of tax liens, would accomplish at least three objectives. It would save taxpayer dollars, streamline the process for filing, correcting, and releasing tax liens, and improve taxpayer and public access to tax lien information.

The IRS estimates that moving from a paper-based tax lien system to an Internet-based, Federal tax lien registry would save about $150 million over 10 years. These savings would come from the elimination of State filing fees, paper and mailing costs, IRS administrative and travel costs related to paper filing problems, and the cost of lost taxes whenever the IRS makes an error or a tax lien filing is misplaced or delayed. Filing fees, for example, vary widely from State to State, but typically cost at least $10 per filing, and in some States cost as much as $150. If a taxpayer has real estate in multiple jurisdictions, those costs multiply. A Federal tax lien system would standardize costs for all taxpayers, and require only one filing across all jurisdictions.

In addition, right now, an IRS service center is currently charged with filing tax liens nationwide and complying with the myriad filing rules in effect in the 4,100 recording offices across the country. Eliminating the paper filing system would free virtually that entire service center for other taxpayer services and enforcement work.

Electronic filing would not only save money, it would improve taxpayer service. Taxpayers who are the subject of a tax lien filing, for example, would benefit from an electronic registry in several ways. First, taxpayers would be able to review their liens as soon as they are filed online, without having to make a physical trip to one or more recording offices. Second, taxpayers would have an easy way to look up their liens on multiple occasions, identify problems, and correct any errors. A single tax lien registry would be particularly useful for taxpayers who move during the ten years that a tax lien can be in effect and have to look up liens in jurisdictions where they no longer live.

Third, once the underlying tax liability is resolved, the IRS would be required to release the tax lien in 20 days, instead of the 30 days allowed under current law. The longer 30-day period is necessitated by the current complexities associated with filing a paper lien in one or more offices across the country, requiring the action of multiple parties in different jurisdictions. These complexities would be eliminated by the establishment of an electronic registry. The registry would also enable taxpayers, after they pay their taxes, to make sure their liens have been lifted.

Creditors who need to research Federal tax liens would also benefit from a single electronic registry. Lenders, security holders and others, for example, would be able to use a simplified search process that could take place online and would not require procedures that, ultimately, require physical trips to multiple locations. A single tax lien registry would make it easier to locate tax liens for persons who have moved from the jurisdictions where the liens were first filed. Simplifying the search process would also provide greater certainty that all tax liens were found. The ability to research Federal tax liens remotely and instantaneously should be of particular benefit to larger lenders and to creditors of taxpayers with assets in more than one county or State.

Tax liens are not a topic that normally excites the public's interest. But sound tax administration requires attention to efficient, effective and low-cost filing systems. Saving taxpayer dollars is more important than ever as Congress looks for ways to tackle the deficit.

Federal law is currently impeding development of a more efficient, cost effective tax lien filing system. Amending the law as indicated in the Tax Lien Simplification Act to streamline the tax lien filing system, moving it from a paper-based to an electronic-based system, would not only advance the more efficient, effective tax system we all want, it would also save taxpayer money. At the same time, it would make the system work better for individual taxpayers by reducing the possibility for mistakes and speeding up the release of liens for taxpayers who have paid. Modernizing our tax lien filing system makes sense in every way. I urge our colleagues to join us in enacting this bill into law this year.