White House seeks $10 billion savings in regulatory rollback

WASHINGTON – President Obama's effort to roll back costly regulations that are not needed could save more than $10 billion over five years, but critics say that's a drop in the bucket.

A total of 26 federal agencies produced final plans that include more than 500 possible changes, including more than 100 at the Transportation Department— the lone agency run by a Republican, former congressman Ray LaHood.

Congressional Republicans, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have led the criticism of the Obama administration for piling on regulations they say will cost businesses billions of dollars. Tops on their list: the health care and financial overhauls of 2010 and a pending change in ozone standards sought by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Acknowledging those concerns, Cass Sunstein, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said Tuesday that the average year produces about $5 billion in new regulations. During the first two years of Obama's presidency, he said, the cost burden of new regulations was lower than in the last two years under George W. Bush.

Obama announced the look-back on regulations in January. The result: more than 800 pages with more than 500 proposed changes. The savings: more than $4 billion in the bank or in process, with an additional $6 billion planned.

The changes "are going to make a real difference to the American people," Sunstein said.

Among the examples of rules rollbacks in the works are:

•Allowing doctors to practice "tele-medicine" in rural areas.

•Escalating Pentagon contract payments to up to 60,000 small businesses.

•Changing export rules and visa practices at the State Department.

Republicans pounced on the White House announcement as inadequate. "The results are underwhelming," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives plans to tackle regulations when it returns to Washington in September. Lawmakers want to crack down on the EPA and the National Labor Relations Board while requiring congressional approval of any regulation that would have a significant impact on the economy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was slightly more optimistic, but it withheld its full endorsement. "The administration's findings and determinations, on their own, are a worthy effort at making technical changes to the regulatory process," the chamber's Bill Kovacs said.

Federal judge to hear arguments on Alabama immigration law called one of the toughest in US

A federal judge in Birmingham is poised to hear arguments from the Obama administration and others Wednesday over whether a new Alabama immigration law constitutes an unfair assault on civil liberties or is a long-overdue effort to protect American jobs and borders.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn scheduled a hearing starting at 9 a.m. Wednesday on motions seeking to temporarily block a new state law that’s been described by supporters and opponents as the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in the country. Attorneys said they don’t know when Blackburn will rule, but pointed out that she doesn’t have much time because the immigration law is set to take effect Sept. 1.
The measure allows police officers, in conducting routine traffic stops, to arrest those they suspect of being illegal immigrants. The law’s broad provisions also make it a crime to transport or provide shelter to an illegal immigrant. It also requires schools to report the immigration status of students, a provision opponents say will make many parents afraid to send their children to school.
The lawsuits challenging the law — filed by the Obama administration, a coalition of civil rights groups and church leaders — have all been consolidated before the chief federal judge from Alabama’s northern district.
The challenges in Alabama are being closed watched nationwide. At issue is just how far Alabama can go in controlling illegal immigration. Injunctions have been issued against all or parts of similar immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and Utah. Impacts are potentially wide-reaching as some Alabama farmers fret they won’t find affordable workers to harvest crops and school officials worry over whether the children of illegal immigrants will be denied an education. One provision, critics say, may even create long lines at courthouses by requiring vehicle owners to show proof of citizenship when they buy tags.
The Obama administration argues in its lawsuit that enforcing immigration laws is the job of the federal government, not the states. Another challenge was filed by a coalition of civil rights groups including the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. A third lawsuit was filed by bishops of the Catholic, United Methodist and Episcopal churches in Alabama and claims the law makes it a crime for Christians to follow the Biblical instructions to be “Good Samaritans” and help one another.
But lawmakers who passed the law argued it was necessary because the federal government had been lax in enforcing immigration laws.
An attorney for the bishops, Augusta Dowd of Birmingham, said she expects the hearing will continue into Wednesday afternoon. She said she doesn’t know when a ruling will be issued by Blackburn, a former federal prosecutor who became a federal judge in 1991 after being nominated by George H.W. Bush.
“I know she’s very cognizant of the Sept. 1 date,” Dowd said.
Sam Brooke, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the civil rights groups will be asking that “the entire law” be tossed out even as their attorneys object to specific provisions of the law.
“This law is unconstitutional in many ways,” Brooke added.
Brooklyn Roberts, an attorney and executive director of the Eagle Forum of Alabama, which supports the new law, said she expects some of the major provisions to be upheld in court — including a provision that requires employers to use a federal system called E-Verify to determine if new workers are in the country legally.
The group pushed for years for such a law, complaining that illegal aliens constitute a security risk and a drain on state resources.
“It took a couple of years, but we finally got something through,” Roberts said, adding “we can’t continue to let people flood over the border unchecked.”
Supporters in the Legislature said the law would protect Alabama jobs and even those immigrants in the country legally.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Micky Hammon, has said it would ease unemployment by opening up jobs currently held by illegal immigrants. More than 200,000 people in Alabama were unemployed in May, according to the latest statistics available.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are about 120,000 illegal immigrants in the state, many believed to be working at farms, chicken processing plants and in construction.
Some Alabama farmers fret, however, that the law will make it difficult to raise a work force at planting and harvesting time.
Tom Bentley, a 65-year-old retired peach farmer, said he stopped farming on most of his property years ago because of the headaches of ensuring his work force was legal. He said he obtained his workers through a federal program that provides documented workers for nine months out of the year, but keeping up with the myriad rules and red tape was time-consuming and expensive.
He warned workers would go pick crops elsewhere in the U.S. without such laws, leaving farmers the trouble of finding local workers willing to work long days picking peaches in the withering summer heat in Alabama. Most say that’s a job mainly immigrants are willing to do.
“These folks that are in jail or on welfare aren’t going to pick peaches,” Bentley said.

White House, lawmakers speed up debt-reduction talks

The White House and congressional leaders are accelerating negotiations over the biggest debt-reduction package in at least two decades amid mounting concern that the effort is running out of time.

Over the next six weeks, negotiators must strike a bipartisan compromise to slice more than $2 trillion from the federal budget by 2021, reduce the complex plan to writing and persuade a bitterly divided Congress to support it.

But one or both chambers is due to be on break for three of those weeks. And when Congress last reached a big debt-reduction deal, it took more than a month just to draft the legislation. That leaves little room for chance — or last-minute negotiating to marshal votes for what is likely to be a politically difficult package of unprecedented cuts to long-
sacrosanct federal programs.

“I keep talking to other colleagues who have confidence that someone else is working things out,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a freshman member of the Budget Committee. “But I keep looking around thinking, ‘If we’re not doing it, then who is?’ ”
Even the broad goal of the talks is subject to dispute. Some lawmakers consider it too timid, arguing that the nation needs to find more than $4 trillion in savings by 2021 to avoid a debt crisis. Others view $2 trillion as impossibly ambitious. And hardly anybody wants to support the most critical part of the package: more borrowing authority for a nation already mired in red ink.
“There’s a large degree of apprehension,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “This is a seminal moment where we can do something great for the country. But there’s apprehension about it, because of the pace at which it’s going and the level of detail.”
With an Aug. 2 deadline nearing, along with the threat of turmoil in global financial markets if Congress doesn’t act, Vice President Biden is stepping up talks this week with six lawmakers from both parties in hopes of presenting a plan to President Obama and congressional leaders by July 4. So far, negotiators have identified many areas of consensus: Farmers are certain to lose some federal subsidies, for example. And federal workers will have to contribute more to finance their retirement.
But what Biden called “the philosophically big-ticket items” remain: the Republican demand for significant savings from Medicare, the biggest driver of future deficits, and the Democratic demand for fresh revenue.
“There are differences that are going to have to be bridged,” the vice president said last week, after emerging from a bargaining session at the Capitol. “We’re not going to cut any deal that can’t be sold.”
Still, leaders in both parties acknowledge that the sales job will not be easy, particularly in the House. Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has demonstrated limited control over his independent-minded caucus, which is dominated by conservatives who are skeptical about the need to raise the legal limit on government borrowing.
For many, the memory is still fresh of that queasy day in September 2008 when Boehner struggled to get a third of his conference to support the Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout. The first vote failed, sending stock markets tumbling nearly 800 points.

Boehner and other GOP leaders say they are committed to raising the debt limit, now set at $14.3 trillion, to avoid default, an outcome they acknowledge could prove economically disastrous. Default could also prove politically disastrous: A new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll found that more people say they would blame Republicans in Congress than Obama if debt-ceiling talks broke down.

Over the past two months, GOP leaders have been holding “listening sessions” to find out “where the center of gravity in our caucus is on this issue,” said House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.), who is leading the sessions with Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (Mich.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).
The requirement that any increase in the debt ceiling be matched dollar for dollar with spending cuts emerged from those sessions, Ryan said. But other sticky issues remain, with no clear path to resolution.
Although Republicans are demanding deep cuts in domestic programs, they are resisting sharp reductions at the Pentagon in the Biden talks, a key demand for many Democrats. Senior GOP aides said it would be hard to sell defense cuts to their skeptical troops.
“Guys like me, I’ll just say no,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-
Calif.), a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who argues that any reduction in military spending must be accompanied by a detailed analysis of the impact on national security. “Republicans, if they’re not careful, are going to saw off the third leg of the Republican stool. The leg of national security is going to get chopped off.”
Revenue is another major obstacle. Many Democrats say they could never vote to gut programs that help low- and middle-income families unless the wealthy are also forced to sacrifice. Democrats argue that Republicans should at least join them in eliminating corporate tax breaks that benefit major oil and gas companies and chief executives with private jets.
Senate Republicans have shown some openness to that approach, voting last week to eliminate tax breaks for ethanol blenders. But House leaders remain opposed to targeting credits and deductions without also overhauling the tax code and lowering rates. In the Biden talks, Republicans have so far declined to consider eliminating even certain temporary tax breaks, such as those for Puerto Rican rum and NASCAR tracks, that have been repeatedly lampooned by watchdog groups.
Coons, the Democrat from Delaware, is working on another point of conflict: the mechanism for enforcing a multi-year deal to cut spending. Republicans want annual spending limits, enforced by automatic spending cuts when the caps are breached. Obama wants a deficit limit that triggers both spending cuts and tax increases.
Coons is pressing a third approach, which would set annual targets for savings and trigger both tax increases and cuts to entitlement programs if the targets are not met.
“For me and my party, standing up and saying, ‘I’m willing to reduce entitlement benefits,’ is every bit as abhorrent as it is for Republicans to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to raise revenue,’ ” Coons said. If both priorities are at risk, he said, “that should be a strong enough motivator to keep us at the table, striving to meet these savings goals.”
Coons said several Republicans are interested in the idea, which was first proposed by the Bipartisan Policy Center, although none has endorsed it publicly. The idea has also won support from House Democratic leaders.
“I frankly don’t see a better alternative,” Coons said. “And I’m very worried that we’re running out of time.”

Biden on debt-reduction talks: Negotiators ‘getting down to the real hard stuff’

After six weeks of talks with congressional leaders aimed at restraining the spiraling national debt, Vice President Biden emerged Thursday with a blunt message: Now, the hard part begins.

Next week, Biden said, negotiators from the White House and Capitol Hill will begin working “around the clock” to bridge the yawning philosophical divide between the two parties, as Democrats press for fresh revenue and Republicans push for significant cuts to federal health programs as part of the debt-reduction package.

“Now we’re getting down to the real hard stuff: I’ll trade you my bicycle for your golf clubs,” Biden told reporters, adding that he remains optimistic that the talks will produce a tentative agreement before the July 4 break.
“Everyone wants an agreement,” Biden said. “There’s no principal in that room that doesn’t want to get an agreement that bends the curve on the long-term debt, and that is sufficiently realistic to get us to $4 trillion over a decade or so in terms of [debt] reduction.”

Biden spoke after emerging from the latest two-hour bargaining session at the U.S. Capitol with top administration officials and six lawmakers from the House and Senate. The group, which began meeting May 5, is rushing to assemble a debt-reduction package to ease passage of an increase in the legal limit on government borrowing, which is set at $14.3 trillion.

The national debt is already bumping up against that limit. Unless Congress acts, the government risks defaulting on its obligations after Aug. 2. Lawmakers in both parties have said they will not vote to raise the debt limit without a plan to dramatically restrain future borrowing.
So far, negotiators have plowed through the major categories of the federal budget, looking for areas of common ground. Democrats and Republicans are interested in cutting farm subsidies, for example, and both sides want to sharply slow the growth of spending on government agencies.
“We’ve gone through all the discrete elements of the budget and we’ve said, ‘Okay, if we have an agreement on everything, we agree on this piece. . . . We can save $10 here,’ ” Biden said. But, he added, an agreement will not be sealed until the parties address larger differences “that are going to have to be bridged.” And that, he said, “won’t occur till the end.”
Biden said that Democrats will insist that any deal include new revenue, and that the White House will continue pushing for cuts in military spending. So far, Republicans have resisted defense cuts and have refused to consider any increases in taxes.
Biden said Democrats are open to reaping savings from federal health programs, including Medicare, which is projected to be the biggest driver of future spending.
“I don’t mean major Medicare reform, but just changes in health policy,” he said.
Possibilities include demanding larger discounts from drug companies and lower payment rates for health-care providers. The group has also discussed charging well-off beneficiaries more for Medicare, according to people familiar with the talks, an idea endorsed by House Republicans and President Obama’s fiscal commission.

The two sides appear to agree on the magnitude of the package: at least $2 trillion in savings — not including interest on the debt — to pair with an increase in the debt limit of a similar size, according to people familiar with the talks. The government needs at least $2 trillion in fresh borrowing authority to pay the bills through the 2012 election, and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has said House Republicans will insist that the increase be met with dollar-for-dollar savings.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) agreed that the group is making progress.

“We are continuing to try to push forward to the kind of goals that have been set out by the speaker and others,” he told reporters.

Though any debt-reduction plan is likely to be politically painful, Biden said the group is determined to produce a package that can pass the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate and convince U.S. investors and world financial markets that Washington can muster the political will to avoid the kind of debt crisis that has sparked riots in Greece.

“What is the schtick out there? That this is a dysfunctional place. Can’t get anything done,” Biden said of Washington. “The single most important thing to do for the markets is convince them that no, no, no, that’s not true. We can handle significant decisions and make them.”