Regulatory Transactions

The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) is calling on the Obama administration to issue an executive order that would create a moratorium on federal financial regulation in order to protect smaller financial institutions against “regulatory burdens that are not required by statute or necessitated by serious, material, quantifiable and well-documented safety and soundness concerns.”

In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), CUNA President and CEO Bill Cheney said that a regulatory moratorium would allow regulators to study the impact of their current rules on the nation’s smaller financial institutions. Cheney also asked the OMB to create an Office of Regulatory Burden Monitoring, which would determine the burden that new regulations would have on smaller lenders.

EPA proposed a rule in July that would change the definition of solid waste under RCRA to require more stringent regulation for certain materials to be recycled. This proposal has several flaws: (1) EPA does not have the authority to regulate materials that are not solid wastes, and many of the materials covered by the rule are not wastes at all, (2) the proposal would not reduce future “damage cases”, which is what EPA says it is trying to do with the rule, and (3) the proposal would negatively impact legitimate recycling activities. All of this raises the question: Why is EPA against recycling?