Regulatory Flexibility Act

Regulatory Flexibility Act

Long title	An Act to amend title 5, United States Code, to improve Federal rulemaking by creating procedures to analyze the availability of more flexible regulatory approaches for small entities, and for other purposes
Acronyms (colloquial)	RFA / "the Reg Flex Act"
Enacted by	the 96th United States Congress
Effective	September 19, 1980
Citations
Public law	96-354
Statutes at Large	94 Stat. 1164
Codification
Acts amended	Administrative Procedure Act
Titles amended	5 U.S.C.: Government Organization and Employees
U.S.C. sections created	5 U.S.C. ch. 6 § 601 et seq.
Legislative history
Introduced in the U.S. Senate as S. 299 by John Culver (D–IA) on January 31, 1979 Committee consideration by Committees on the Judiciary of the U.S. House and Senate; Committees on Small Business of both Houses Passed the House Small Business Committee on 17 July 1979 (39-0) Passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on 7 May 1980 (unanimous voice vote) Reported by the joint conference committee on 9 September 1980 (Senate bill passed in lieu of House bill); agreed to by the U.S. Senate on 6 August 1980 and 9 September 1980 (unanimous voice votes) and by the U.S. House of Representatives on 9 September 1980 (unanimous voice vote, suspension of the rules) Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on September 19, 1980
Major amendments
Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA), P.L. 104-121, 1996

The Regulatory Flexibility Act is perhaps the most comprehensive effort by the U.S. federal government to balance the social goals of federal regulations with the needs and capabilities of small businesses and other small entities in American society.

In practice, the RFA has been an interesting and much-imitated attempt to "scale" the actions of the federal government to the size of the groups and organizations affected.

Passed in 1980, the RFA has been gradually strengthened in the intervening years, and has historically enjoyed strong bipartisan support.

Since the federal government began calculating the economic impact of the RFA in 1998, the law is estimated to have saved small entities (and the U.S. economy as a whole) more than $200 billion without undermining the broad purposes of the regulations it affects. More than 40 U.S. states, as well as a number of other nations, have adopted similar approaches.

The origins of the RFA can be traced back to expressions of discontent about federal regulations by businesses from the 1930s onward, but the urgency of these concerns increased sharply as new federal agencies were created, and older ones given fresh mandates to pursue, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Studies of the economic role of smaller businesses in the 1970s showed links to the growth of overall employment and technological innovation.

These factors, together with the increasing political assertiveness of U.S. small businesses, provided impetus for a series of laws enacted from 1976-1984 including the RFA, the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Small Business Development Center Act, the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), the Small Business Innovation Research Act (SBIR), and the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA).

The first in this line of laws was enacted in June 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-305 creating an Office of Advocacy within the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), and giving that Office responsibility for assessing the impact of federal regulations on small firms. The law called on the Office of Advocacy to "measure the direct costs and other effects of government regulation on small businesses; and make legislative and nonlegislative proposals for eliminating excessive or unnecessary regulations of small businesses."

This was a significant recognition of the issue of scale in federal regulations, but its remedies—measuring effects and offering proposals—were incomplete.

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Wikipedia