Revolt of the Regulated

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

The man sitting across the street from the White House claiming that his left-handed pitch opening the All-Star Game had a wicked curve is the decade's Antichrist to Ralph Nader. He is George Bush, and he is proud to be in the vice-presidential ranks with immortals like William Rufus Devane King and James Schoolcraft Sherman. As head of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, Bush is now leading the battle against rules that affect everything from the Hawaiian tree snail to high school sopranos.

He has just finished a tense press conference announcing that the Administration is studying 30 more regulations to see if they are choking American life. Already, 54 rules have been scrutinized, and 22 of them are targeted for change. The latest review will cut into the explosive areas of equal rights, minority hiring, the environment, the handicapped and child safety. The old Yale first baseman knows that by the evening news, women, blacks, educators, environmentalists and mothers will be throwing fastballs at his head.

How did it all happen? Bush half wonders aloud. American life is now freighted with 56 million words of federal regulatory scripture. There are rules for prime farm lands, tribal government elections, gypsum wild buckwheat, car pools, surface mining, noise, personal protective devices. "There's one that [Secretary of Education] Ted Bell talked to me about on glee clubs," Bush says, almost unbelieving. "Somebody decreed that you can't any more have a boys' choir and a girls' choir, but that you have to do it by octaves. All you guys with deep voices, girls and boys, down on this end, all you with middle-range voices, up here, all you sopranos, boys and girls, there. It has just been carried to an extreme."

Bush felt the regulatory onslaught before he became Vice President. In his own oil-exploration business, it took only a couple of permits to drill a well 25 years ago in some areas. Today it can take a dozen or more. On the board of Eli Lilly & Co., Bush watched the Government and the corporation argue over distinguishing research from production, until the firm moved some of its experimentation to France.

But his principal worry is not about the large corporations, with their armies of bookkeepers and computers and huge Washington staffs to help them cope. "The sad thing," says Bush, "is that the people who are getting hurt are the small businesses." He tells of a motel operator in the West who found himself embroiled in a controversy over whether his employees could take their uniforms home to launder, something they preferred to do, but something the Government said could not be done without extra pay. The Rev. Donald Nesti, president of Pittsburgh's Duquesne University (4,700 students), told Bush recently that regulations were costing his institution $3 million a year, enough to put 194 students through the four-year course.

Bush's approach is to reason and persuade more than to assault. He measured his progress by the fact that the number of proposed federal rules is down by a half and, he insists, those being promulgated are better thought through. Best of all, Bush sees a change in attitude among those who draw up and enforce regulations. Last week the Vice President summoned to his office the Regulatory Reform Task Force from the Department of Health and Human Services. Bush asked Paul Willging, who heads the reform movement in HHS, "How are you going to make your career bureaucracy respond? Somebody had to write these rules. These regulations are out there. I'm sure that the people who wrote them believe what they wrote." Willging's answer: "The reason that they will respond is that they are getting new direction from the very top. They will respond, believe me, they will respond." If that message has indeed been implanted in Washington, Ronald Reagan may even make some headway in the next sector of his campaign to renew the American economy.

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