Administration to trim onerous business rules

The Obama administration has identified dozens of unneeded regulations -- from handling spilled milk to requiring warm-air hand dryers -- that should be eliminated to save hundreds of millions of hours a year in filling out forms and, over time, billions of dollars in costs.

The proposed changes, a few of which already have been enacted or are in their final stages, came in a report last week from a governmentwide review ordered by President Barack Obama in January to weed out overly burdensome rules and stimulate job growth.

Obama has been under fire from Republicans and business groups for expanding government regulations, particularly after the enactment last year of the sweeping health care and financial reform laws.

The proposed rule reductions were applauded by administration critics as a good first step to easing burdens on businesses and local governments. But an environmental group warned that the White House needed to be careful not to eliminate rules that protect the public.

White House officials said they were committed to getting rid of regulations "that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules," said Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Detailed plans to reduce regulations came from 30 federal agencies and departments. The Commerce Department, for example, proposed to simplify government rules on exports.

The White House posted the plans on its website, whitehouse.gov, and asked the public for comments. Most of the changes must go through formal rule-writing procedures that also require public comment periods.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Thursday that it already had made final a new rule to streamline and simplify several requirements as part of the broader regulatory review.

Among them were updating a definition of potable water to be consistent with Environmental Protection Agency standards, removing outdated standards that require warm-air hand dryers to allow for new technology that uses room-temperature air, and eliminating requirements for employers to send records to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health because the records "don't serve a useful research purpose."

The White House said those changes alone would eliminate more than 1.9 million annual hours of "redundant reporting requirements" for employers, saving more than $40 million a year in costs.

At the urging of dairy farmers, the EPA in April changed rules that had included milk in oil spill regulations that required special containment facilities and other measures. The rule change will save the dairy industry $146 million a year.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he supported "any effort on the part of the president to make the regulatory system more predictable, more transparent and less onerous for job creators." But he said that "flawed" proposed regulations in the pipeline were just as much of a threat as existing ones.