Sponsors (3)
The bill trades tighter caps, transparency, and congressional control over unfunded regulatory costs—reducing potential regulatory burdens on businesses and taxpayers—for increased risk that important health, safety, or environmental rules could be delayed, politicized, or impose new administrative costs on agencies and taxpayers.
Small businesses and other regulated entities would face fewer new unfunded compliance costs because OMB and agencies must set, cap, and report annual limits on net increases in unfunded regulatory costs, reducing the likelihood of surprise rule-driven expenses.
Taxpayers and the public would gain clearer information about regulatory costs because OMB must publish agency and governmentwide limits, bases, and cost calculations quickly and maintain a designated website for those disclosures.
Congress would gain a formal role to approve any agency limit or individual rule that would permit net increases in unfunded regulatory costs, increasing legislative oversight of regulatory cost growth.
The limits could delay, narrow, or block agency rules that provide health, safety, or environmental protections if compliance costs would push agencies past their caps, slowing or preventing benefits to the public.
Decision-making power would shift toward OMB and Congress for cost approvals, which could politicize technical regulatory choices and create greater uncertainty for businesses and state/local governments planning compliance.
Agencies (and thus taxpayers) could face higher compliance and administrative costs from new reporting, notification, and potential judicial-review processes required to implement and defend the limits.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Directs OMB to set annual governmentwide and agency caps on additional unfunded regulatory costs, blocks net increases unless Congress approves, and requires public reporting.
Introduced May 8, 2025 by Pat Fallon · Last progress May 8, 2025
Requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to set annual governmentwide and agency-level caps on any additional unfunded regulatory costs and to publish those caps and the basis for them. Agencies must propose their limits in advance, may be required to offset new unfunded costs, and may not finalize rules that would raise net unfunded costs unless Congress approves the increase by joint resolution (with some narrow presidential exceptions).