How Congress Can Advance Government Efficiency
For the first time in many decades, improving government is cool again. Everyone is talking about the need to examine closely what our federal government is doing and how it is spending taxpayer money. President Trump has established the Department of Government Efficiency, every federal agency has been tasked with reviewing all of its regulations and spending, and Congress has created multiple caucuses and a subcommittee to identify areas for improved government efficiency. This has become a whole-of-government endeavor to identify ways to reduce burdensome regulations and identify cost savings for taxpayers.
This effort is commendable; all Americans should contribute and support the work. Americans for Prosperity will never stop fighting to achieve an economy that works for all — empowering people to earn success and realize their potential.
We constantly hear about the negative impacts of government inefficiency from our millions of grassroots activists in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and every other state. Their stories motivate us and help us collect bottom-up ideas about the most significant problems our leaders should tackle first.
How can we ensure that today’s reforms focused on efficiency and waste are not just something that can be overturned in four years when a new Administration takes office? Congress must exercise its power to ensure their permanence. My team has spent many years and extra time over the past year identifying specific steps Congress can take today to save taxpayer money and prevent unreasonably burdensome regulations. These include robustly exercising its oversight authority to end horrific Biden-era regulations, codifying positive developments in the Trump Administration, and passing legislation that will prevent future bureaucratic overreach.
End Misguided Biden Era Regulations
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides Congress with a procedure for overturning recently issued rules by a majority vote of disapproval in both chambers. The current Congress should robustly utilize this procedure to leverage its oversight powers to reverse the negative impacts imposed by misguided regulations implemented in the Biden Administration.
Regulations that Congress should reverse with haste include regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau limiting what debts can be considered in credit reports and the Department of Energy’s recent rule inhibiting consumers from accessing gas water heaters. My colleague Faith Burns has outlined an even longer list of regulations that deserve prompt action by Congress.
However, merely acting on these few regulations will not reverse the harm from the past four years. As we recently noted, the current CRA procedure “requires a separate resolution for each rule, and, in practice, limits the rules that can be fast-tracked for repeal to those issued in the prior few months. These cumbersome procedures needlessly consume floor time while subjecting the lawmaking branch of government to an unreasonable shot-clock. This limits Congress’s capacity to serve as a real-time check on lawmaking by the administrative state.”
Congress must establish a procedure for exercising its full oversight powers over all regulations passed by federal agencies. Congress is the branch tasked with making our laws; no rules should be immune from reversal when they conflict with Congress’s will expressed through federal law. Additionally, Congress should not be required to consider regulations one at a time. The House-passed Midnight Rules Relief Act would take a significant step toward restoring its proper authority and allows the legislative branch to reject multiple regulations in a single resolution rather than needing to reject them one at a time.
Make Permanent Positive Developments
The Trump Administration has been remarkably busy so far – with 80+ executive orders and hundreds of agency actions already taking place to implement the agenda he articulated during the 2024 campaign. Actions by the executive are temporary, and Congress must now act if we hope for positive actions to outlast these four years.
As my colleague at AFP Foundation has noted, the President’s executive order directing agencies to review their regulations “is an important first step to ridding the regulatory state of unconstitutional, overbroad, and harmful regulations” but if we hope to see these harmful regulations never raise their head again, Congress must ensure both current and future laws more clearly outline what actions they want agencies to take in order to achieve clear goals. Congress can contribute by starting that now.
Congress should also quickly pass the Reorganizing Government Act to restore a legal pathway for the President to propose agency reorganizations. Under this legislation, the President can propose executive branch reorganization plans while retaining authority in Congress to accept or reject those changes.
We currently have hundreds of federal agencies and commissions; it is past time to reevaluate whether they are engaged in Constitutional and beneficial activities. There are likely many opportunities to improve government efficiency while also achieving the goals outlined by Congress in law.
Prevent Future Bureaucratic Overreach
Each presidential administration adds hundreds of economically significant rules to the Code of Federal Regulations. Some are valuable, but many more are unnecessary, duplicative, or outside of the role our Founders intended for the federal government. Many regulations go beyond their intended goal of leveling the playing field and protecting the public, and instead, overregulation has caused the opposite to occur. The federal government’s burdensome regulations and bloated budgets now slow economic growth, cause inflation, and advantage big business at the expense of entrepreneurs and ordinary Americans.
Congress can pass two key pieces of existing legislation—the REINS Act and the GOOD Act—to prevent a future administration from having to repeat many of the actions taken by the Trump Administration.
The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act has passed the House five times, gaining bipartisan support each time. In summary, this proposal requires that significant new regulations receive congressional approval before implementation. This grants Congress the final say on whether proposed rules accurately reflect the laws it has enacted. States like Kansas and Indiana have recently adopted such reforms, and many more appear ready to follow suit before their legislative sessions conclude this year. Congress should finally send REINS to the President’s desk to ensure that unelected bureaucrats can no longer implement costly regulations that do not align with its will.
Another critical piece of legislation will leverage transparency to prevent agencies from utilizing guidance documents to impose new requirements in the veil of darkness. The Guidance Out of Darkness (GOOD) Act requires agencies to publish all their regulatory guidance in a searchable, digital format. This legislation would enshrine an executive order from the first Trump Administration into federal law and prevent future Administrations from following Biden’s lead by reversing course to allow standards to be developed in the shadows.
Conclusion
In conclusion, improving government efficiency is a critical endeavor that requires a concerted effort from Congress and not just the executive branch. By exercising its oversight authority, making positive developments permanent, and preventing future bureaucratic overreach, Congress can ensure that government actions align with the laws it passed and benefit all Americans. Leveraging existing legislation and promoting transparency will be key to achieving these goals and fostering a more efficient and accountable government.