When freshman lawmaker Alex Riley (R-Springfield) first read about the ‘One In, One Out’ rule in the Wall Street Journal, he began to investigate the number of regulations imposed by state agencies.
“We don't have quite as high of a burden as states like Ohio but we still have a pretty significant regulatory burden,” Rep. Riley said.
The Washington Examiner reports that residents and business owners are enduring 113,000 different regulations.
“It surprised me that Missouri had as many regulations as it did,” Riley told the St. Louis Record. “Missouri has imposed a lot of regulations and there are a lot of states that impose far fewer. I expected Missouri to be a little freer in that regard.”
In response, Riley introduced House Bill 576, which, if passed, is designed to slow the growth of regulation by requiring state agencies to identify two rules to be eliminated for every one new rule proposed.
“A lot of business owners have to go through all these state regulations to ensure they are complying with state law and a lot of them don't know what applies to them and it affects the small businesses the most because the, the big companies and corporations have the money to hire attorneys to go through the regulatory codes and make sure they are compliant with the law,” Riley said. “But the small mom and pop type businesses don't necessarily have those same resources.”
Riley’s HB 576 differs from former President Trump’s Executive Order 13771, which mandated the One In, Two Out on federal agencies, in that it doesn’t entertain any exceptions.
“My understanding is that President Trump’s order, whether it contained exceptions in the original order or exceptions were added later, contained a lot of exceptions, which resulted in less benefit than you would otherwise have expected from the headline,” he said.
Riley isn’t expecting smooth sailing. He’s already received some negative feedback.
“The state agencies will certainly voice opposition,” he said. “I've received some notes from some agencies commenting that this would be a difficult thing for them to perform. So, there will certainly be some backlash from the agencies. I would expect there also to be some opposition from groups of various political types that just oppose any efforts to roll back government red tape and the role of government in people's lives.”
Although successfully filed, HB 576 has not yet been referred to a committee.
“There's been over a thousand bills filed in the house so far this year and very, very few of those have been assigned to a committee,” Riley added. “So, I expect more to be assigned as the session moves along but we took time off because of COVID concerns here in the house and so everything fell behind a week.”