This breast-beating, though, obscures one fact: Quayle is talking about federal regulators that his boss, George Bush, appointed. When Bush chose Quayle to chair the council in 1989, many pundits condescendingly viewed it as a harmless hobby to help the veep gain stature. But a year later, Bush empowered the Quayle Council to scrutinize regulations because he feared that his own administration was placing too many burdens on business. When the policy magazine National Journal recently hit the president’s desk with the cover headline THE REGULATORY PRESIDENT, Bush was heard to have said: I thought we solved this.
Instead, Bush’s regulators have done a booming business lately. Staffing at the regulatory agencies is 20 percent higher than in 1985. The Federal Trade Commission, chaired by close Bush family friend Janet Steiger, scrutinized twice as many potential mergers in 1989-90 as Reagan’s FTC did in the previous two years. And Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler has made headlines by stopping manufacturers from labeling high-fat foods “light” or orange juice from concentrate “fresh.” In addition, Bush has signed major laws dealing with the environment, civil rights and the handicapped. The government must now issue a torrent of complicated, and sometimes costly, rules telling businesses how to comply.
How could this have happened under Bush-the man who led Reagan’s efforts to promote deregulation? For one, Reagan appointed ideologues committed to deregulation, while Bush emphasized competence and personal friendships, sometimes with-out even inquiring about the nominee’s philosophy of government. The White House blames Congress but privately raps its own regulators for going soft. “You really think they read those regulations?” laughs one White House official. “Hell, no.” The most obvious explanation, though, is that Bush wants to be seen as probusiness and pro-consumer at the same time. Says William Niskanen, editor of Regulation magazine and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan: “He is a committed deregulator, but he’s also a committed environmentalist, and a committed this, that and the other thing.”
The “committed deregulator” Bush was at work in 1990 when he asked Quayle to lead the war on red tape. Since then, the council has weighed in on about 50 rules, with the most bitter fights involving the Environmental Protection Agency. Allan Hubbard, the council’s executive director, cites as its greatest accomplishment a plan to make the FDA get new drugs onto the market faster. “It will save millions of lives and billions of dollars,” he says.
But liberal lawmakers charge that the council allows business groups to circumvent Congress and alter rules through a back door. They claim that the council has tried to weaken safeguards against dangerous drugs and make it easier for factories to exceed Clean Air Act limits. “They have acted recklessly and irresponsibly to usurp powers that belong in the regulatory agencies,” says Rep. Henry Waxman. In December, Waxman held hearings on whether Hubbard, a multimillionaire, tried to weaken the Clean Air Act at the same time he held $18,000 in stock in a utility that will be affected by the law. Hubbard says he followed the law by disclosing his holdings and getting permission from Quayle.
In truth, the council has been neither as damaging as liberal groups claim nor as significant as Quayle maintains. Most of its major proposals to aid business so far haven’t been adopted. And “faceless bureaucrats” at the FDA and EPA who disagree with council directives are hoping to fix the damage when they publish the final rules on drug approvals and clean air. That, of course, wouldn’t sit well with the council. These battles between Bush’s regulators and Bush’s vice president will continue-until Bush himself decides which side to root for.
