Eric Schmitt’s call to cut regulatory red tape is unserious political sloganeering | Opinion

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, the freshman Republican, is lately attracting attention for his crusade against the so-called “administrative state” of bureaucrats who do much of the federal government’s day-to-day work. But there are reasons to be skeptical of his efforts.

As The Star’s Daniel Desrochers reports, Schmitt has introduced legislation that would require the federal government to repeal three regulations for every new rule it implements. And he suggests that the federal bureaucrats who churn out those directives — covering everything from water quality to appliance standards to the safety of your workplace — aren’t directly accountable to the people who have to live with their mandates.

“Congress should have to vote on new regs,” Schmitt wrote on Twitter earlier this year. “Then voters could fire Reps & Senators who vote for this nonsense.”

So why should Missourians be leery of Schmitt’s campaign against the bureaucracy?

Three reasons:

▪ The senator’s concern for democratic accountability appears to be highly situational. It is a striking coincidence that his anti-regulatory stance has found a broad audience at almost exactly the same moment that a Jackson County judge has rebuked Schmitt for his efforts — while serving as Missouri attorney general — to override pandemic-era mask mandates implemented by the Lee’s Summit school district and a number of local boards across the state.

Schmitt didn’t actually have that authority, Judge Marco Roldan found last week.

What’s notable here, though, is not that Schmitt intervened against the masking rules, but that he usurped the authority of local elected decision-makers to do so. If community voters opposed the mask mandates (and many did), they were free to vote out the school board members — “fire” them, in Schmitt’s phrasing — and replace them with new officials more to their liking.

For the sake of a popular right-wing cause, though, Schmitt dispensed with the voter-to-rulemaker relationship he now says is so important. What’s changed?

▪ Schmitt’s 3-to-1 rulemaking proposal is based on sloganeering, not science and reason.

Instead of prudently considering federal regulations, their costs and benefits, the senator would take a hacksaw to the framework of rules intended to protect American health and welfare. Many existing mandates have positive effects, while some are burdensome — and you can’t tell the difference between the two with a snap of the fingers. The good and the bad would all get swept away for the sake of some arbitrary 3-to-1 requirement.

That doesn’t seem like wise governance.

▪ Finally, we believe Schmitt rather overhypes the threat posed by federal regulations and the agencies that create and implement them. “To me, the biggest threat to the constitutional republican form of government is the growth of the administrative state,” Schmitt told Desroschers.

That’s an extraordinary statement, coming just over two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power based on Donald Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

Schmitt has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, incidentally. Apparently, OSHA bureaucrats are the real threat to American democracy.

We won’t make the case that every federal regulation is beneficial. The Congressional Research Service estimated in 2019 that the federal bureaucracy generates at least 3,000 new rules every year. You don’t notice most of them. Still, they can’t all be home runs, can they?

But neither do federal rules expand willy-nilly. They’re often a response to some identifiable need — a bank crash, say, or a plane accident — and there is a long process involved. (There is a saying that many safety regulations are “written in blood,” in reaction to preventable accidents.) Officials propose rules to alleviate the harm. They do a cost-benefit analysis, and take public comment from interested parties. The journey can take years.

Regulations have real-world impacts on Americans’ lives. The Food and Drug Administration recalled OnYums Onion Flavored Rings from Dollar Tree stores this week because the snacks might contain wheat, despite the grain not being listed on the package ingredient list. If your child suffers from celiac disease, that labeling mistake could be a matter of life and death.

And despite Schmitt’s complaints, all of this takes place under democratic auspices. Congress delegates rulemaking to federal agencies. The executive branch federal workers who create those rules? They work for the president.

New federal rules should be subject to scrutiny. And old rules should be culled when no longer useful. But Schmitt doesn’t offer Americans a useful or helpful alternative. Beware the hype.