House Risks Too Much in Regulatory Reform : The ‘contract’: With little scrutiny, a drastic, far-reaching formula goes to the Senate.

Hardly anyone doubts that the federal government is sick. Unfortunately, when it comes to the complicated issue of risk assessment, the “doctors” in the House of Representatives “operated” Tuesday before they had fully diagnosed the illness or knew whether their prescribed treatment would work. Perhaps more shocking, most of them didn’t even understand the cure they endorsed. Now it will be up to the Senate to provide a more reasoned second opinion.

One part of the “contract with America” aims to ensure that any regulation the government institutes on health, safety or the environment addresses a serious problem in a cost-effective way. Certainly it is difficult to find anyone in Washington or elsewhere who would not agree that federal agencies should be prevented from passing unnecessary or misguided regulations. The challenge is to do this without tying the government up in bureaucratic red tape or making it impossible to move quickly when the public’s health or safety is truly threatened.

The House’s risk-assessment bill is not the answer.

There is a great deal of discussion and debate among experts about how to conduct risk assessments and evaluate the economic costs and benefits of a regulation. Scientists have written dozens of reports offering alternative approaches to calculating risks and deciding when action is justified. As methods of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis continue to evolve, the government will need some flexibility. The House bill doesn’t adequately account for that.

This is hardly its only problem. Even those scientists who disagree sharply on the best way to assess risks would agree that different situations require different types of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. Yet the House bill would enshrine a single, rigid formula that in fact would add cumbersome layers to a government bureaucracy most people believe is already too complicated. Officials of the Environmental Protection Agency estimate that they would need to assign 980 staff people to carry out the legislation. The judicial review provisions in the bill ensure that the process is likely to end up being dominated by lawyers rather than by scientists concerned about the common good. And even noncontroversial regulations on such topics as E. coli bacteria in meat, storm warnings and airline safety would require costly, time-consuming risk-assessment studies.

Given how complicated this subject is, Congress should approach it cautiously and deliberately. But the House has passed a bill that received only the most casual scrutiny. The media have barely covered it, and the public remains in the dark about this far-reaching piece of legislation. Few scientists have been asked to testify. There hasn’t been time to identify all of the unintended consequences of legislation that would be applied to hundreds of rules and regulations.

The risk-assessment bill is very different from some other items included in the “contract,” such as the line-item veto, the balanced-budget amendment and term limits. These proposals have been in the public eye for years. They have been debated on the floor of Congress, on radio talk shows, on newspapers’ editorial pages, in living rooms. All of these proposals are much simpler than risk assessment and don’t pose the myriad hard-to-predict impacts on the operations of dozens of federal agencies.

Shouldn’t Congress investigate precisely what the problem is, consult with the experts and carefully evaluate the alternatives? If your doctor did not know whether there would be side effects from a proposed treatment and even told you that he didn’t care if you experienced unintended consequences, you’d run from his office.

Let’s hope Congress slows down so it doesn’t engage in malpractice on the federal regulatory system.