Sponsors (2)
The bill increases transparency and economic rigor in rulemaking and may lower near‑term regulatory costs, but by excluding or discounting non‑monetized benefits and enabling broad retroactive legal challenges it risks weakening health, safety, and environmental protections and creating legal and administrative uncertainty.
Taxpayers and small-business owners will see rulemaking focused on actions with clear, quantifiable monetary benefits, which can reduce unnecessary regulatory costs and lower compliance expenses and consumer prices.
Taxpayers and regulated parties will get more transparency because agencies must publish full benefit–cost and regulatory impact analyses with each rule, making rule rationales easier to review and understand.
Federal employees and state governments will benefit from standardized definitions for benefit–cost and regulatory impact analyses, improving consistency across agency economic assessments and reducing unpredictability.
Taxpayers, small businesses, and the general public may face weaker health, safety, equity, and environmental protections because the bill prioritizes only monetized, immediately quantifiable benefits and excludes non‑monetized harms and benefits from consideration.
All Americans risk higher future costs and greater climate and public‑health harms because agencies could delay or avoid rules with long‑term, hard‑to‑monetize benefits (e.g., climate mitigation, disease prevention).
Small businesses, state governments, and taxpayers face significant legal uncertainty because courts would have broad power to invalidate existing rules retroactively back to Nov 9, 2023, undermining settled regulatory expectations and past investments.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Bars agencies and OMB from using non‑monetized or unquantified factors in regulatory analyses, requires publication of full analyses, OMB guidance, and allows judicial invalidation of rules that relied on such factors.
Official title: To prohibit the use of non-monetized or unqualified factors for regulatory analyses, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 21, 2025 by Pete Sessions · Last progress January 21, 2025
Requires federal agencies to rely only on monetized, quantified monetary benefits when doing regulatory benefit‑cost and impact analyses, bans consideration of non‑monetized or unquantified factors, and creates transparency, OMB guidance, and judicial-review rules to enforce that prohibition. Amends the Regulatory Flexibility Act definitions, requires agencies to publish full analyses and methods with each rule, directs OMB to issue revised guidance within 90 days, and makes rules invalid if they relied on unquantified factors for rules issued on or after November 9, 2023; the changes take effect 30 days after enactment.