On September 11, 2024, the Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC) released its report entitled: “2024 Report on Legislative Requests to Review Existing Regulations.”  This report was a result of various House Standing Committees request of IRRC to review numerous regulations over three years old as allowed by the Regulatory Review Act.  You can read the report here: 2024 Report on Legislative Requests to Review Existing Regulations.pdf.

After our review of the report and the process, I am proposing some additional changes to the Regulatory Review Act to allow the General Assembly and IRRC better utilize and clean up this system.
This legislation would:

• Create a Bicameral Committee on Regulatory Review to review and approve IRRC regulations.  Right now, IRRC Regulations are approved by the Joint Documents Committees and IRRC also approves the Joint Document Committee’s regulations.  Obviously, this is a glaring conflict of interest.  This ensured conflict free regulatory approval process.
• Ensure IRRC receives stakeholder input from the regulated committee as it reviews regulations.
• Updates the timeline for IRRC to submit reports to the General Assembly and the General Assembly to approve final-form regulations to ensure regulations are not approved or submitted when the General Assembly is not in existence every two years.
• Requires state agencies to rescind regulations if the statute authorizing the regulations is repealed, expired, or invalidated by a court order.  Based on the previously cited report, we have many regulations that fall under this category that need repeal.  This would grant agencies a streamlined process to eliminate these regulations.

I hope you will join me in sponsoring these simple and commonsense updates to our Regulatory Review Act to improve the regulatory process.