I believe in sensible, scale-appropriate regulations that protect the things we value – like the environment, public health, and safety – without hampering innovation or imposing excessive burdens on individuals and businesses. I helped launch the Senate Regulations Caucus to address regulatory reform at the federal level. With many legislative efforts currently underway to address over-regulation, the goal of the Senate Regulations Caucus is to unify and lead these efforts to advance meaningful, bipartisan regulatory reform in Congress.
Business owners and entrepreneurs in Maine regularly tell me that the single greatest obstacle to economic growth continues to be overly-burdensome regulations, but as thousands of new rules are proposed every year, Congress isn’t taking any serious steps to address the mountain of regulations that already exist. Because of this, reforming our regulatory processes and reducing overlapping or duplicative regulations is one of my top priorities.
- There’s no question that our infrastructure is in need of repair, but more often than not, big projects get bogged down by bureaucratic red tape. I worked to fix this problem by introducing the Federal Permitting Improvement Act, a bill that streamlines and improves the permitting process for large capital projects, and I was proud to see it pass as part of the long-term highway bill.
- I also introduced the Exemptions for Small Dams Act. This legislation would streamline and reduce expensive, prohibitive, and redundant permitting for small hydro energy operations.
- After I introduced and helped pass legislation in the Senate to alleviate burdens on both credit unions and small banks, President Obama signed into law the House versions of the bills in late 2014.
- I also introduced the Community Bank Relief Act in 2017. This bill preserves financial safety measures and broadens small bank lending opportunities in order to provide families, small businesses, and start-ups with better credit options.