Snapshots from inside Washington's job-killing machine

Snapshots from inside Washington's job-killing machine Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner
By: Hugh Hewitt

Call it "metastatic government." The federal government has grown so large that every month, indeed every week, brings long lists of new examples of the feds' reach into the lives and businesses of ordinary Americans.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission publishes a handy list of its recalls on a monthly basis. In April, the CPSC issued at least 23 recall notices of a wide spectrum of products from candles to garage door openers to hot chocolate pots, and kept up a list of warnings on everything from post-tornado hazards to pool safety and the dangers of open windows around toddlers.

This week the "Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children," a sort of Borg of nanny-state agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture, published sweeping draft "guidelines" on how all food products intended for youths aged 2 to 17 ought to be packaged and marketed.

"Guidance" also flowed out of the Environmental Protection Agency this week, a vast set of paragraphs on the new proposed standards for determining what wet patches of ground the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ought to be regulating going forward.

The EPA candidly admitted it was growing its reach via the new rules, and even the arrival of a letter from 170 congressmen led by three with key oversight roles -- Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, Rep. Tim Holden, R-Pa., and Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. -- didn't deter the bureaucrats in search of more power.

And down in Texas, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service presides over the dunes sagebrush lizard's crawl toward protected status under the Endangered Species Act, which will quickly affect oil and gas exploration across west Texas.

The FWS was taking "input" last week and will continue to do so for a few more before acting to sequester tens of thousands of acres of resource-rich land from use.

These are just four fingers of the many-handed beast that the federal government has become. I am aware of each of them because my law partners and I practice in these areas and field calls daily from companies that have received a recall notice, or which produce food that will have to change its advertising, or who wish to build in areas that are dry 350 days a year but perhaps about to be regulated by the feds under new rules.

The lizard is just the latest in a long line of not-remotely-endangered species that get catapulted onto the "endangered species list" by radical environmentalist groups, with devastating consequences to land owners and those they employ in the building of residential or commercial projects or natural resource exploration.

These are just four agencies acting in just one week or month. These are just the federal burdens rolling out from agencies I know about and work with. The vast majority of the government officials involved aren't bad people or power-mad Machiavels, just executives doing their jobs as directed by law and regulation. We have constructed a self-propelled job-killing machine that grows and grows and grows.

It is hard to overestimate the cost of this metastatic growth in government. We can total up the cost in lawyers and lost production, but we will never see the lost opportunities and the businesses that didn't start because of these proliferating burdens.

Congress has to grapple with this quiet killer of growth, or we will never get back to low unemployment. Each of these job killers proceeds under the banner of good intentions, but they are collectively acting to smother the American dream.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/05/snapshots-inside-washingtons-job-killing-machine#ixzz1LiGAMf5G