Destroying Unnecessary, Misaligned, and Prohibitive Red Tape Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in support today of H.R. 4305, the DUMP Red Tape Act.

I am back again on this subject with this chart that shows the growth and the number of pages in the Federal Register where all of the Federal regulations are published. It is where they are codified. That is where you go to look them up, and the number of pages has quadrupled in my lifetime.

Let me just offer a couple of thoughts on how this bill is, in my view, important for small businesses to get at that problem of the creeping weight of Federal overregulation.

In my district, the Second District of Kansas, the eastern part of the State, it is, more or less, 80 percent of the small businesses in the State employ 20 or fewer people. Eighty percent of them are really small businesses. There are about 93 percent if you go under 500 employees. For a lot of us that sounds like a big number, in my part of the world, but under 20 employees, that is a small business. Those are the Main Street businesses we are talking about.

I talk with a lot of people that own those businesses, that work in those businesses. They are all active in their communities. They support everything from the local sports team to the local charity to the local school's foundation. That is what they are focused on: making a living, making their business work, whatever it is they do: providing professional services, other services, retail items, manufacturing items. That is what they are focused on.

They are not focused on this. They don't have an army of compliance attorneys and compliance consultants to help them figure out what is in these 200,000 pages of Federal regulation and what that means for how they conduct their behavior in their communities each and every day.

Mr. Speaker, how do we figure out where to start? I think this bill is a very commonsense answer: Ask the people who are most affected. The whole point of the red tape hotline that President Trump set up and that this bill codifies and makes permanent is to allow the people in the small business world who are affected by regulatory decisions made in this town, our Nation's Capital, to tell somebody who has the ability to aggregate that information and do something about it. Let's bring it to the attention of lawmakers that this is where you need to focus. This one, of all of these, is what is making a difference in preventing me from adding more employees or having a little more liquidity so that I can maybe redo the storefront on Main Street. Maybe I can give a little more to the local charitable cause or maybe my family will just be a little bit more comfortable going into the holidays.

Mr. Speaker, ask the people affected and listen to their voices. That is what this bill does. It makes sure we put in place a simple structure that is permanent so that the vagaries of this town don't change things on Main Street.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly support this measure. It is just common sense.

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