Bush to Call for Freeze on New Regulations

The White House plans to announce a 90-day moratorium on implementing a wide array of new regulations as part of President Bush’s effort to help the slumping economy, Administration officials said Monday.

Sources said that the decision gives the Administration time to mount a top-level review of regulations under consideration by nearly every part of the executive branch except independent federal agencies. It is likely to be officially announced either later this week or in Bush’s State of the Union address next Tuesday.

Administration officials stressed that the plan for a 90-day moratorium, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, had not yet been formally approved by Bush but they said they are certain he will embrace the idea.

Senior Administration sources said the plan will not affect regulations dealing with public health or safety. They also said the review will not attempt to make any changes that require congressional approval.

Officials said the thrust of the regulatory review process will be to examine and streamline longstanding rules that have been inherited by the Bush Administration.

But officials acknowledged that the suspension could affect the execution of major domestic legislative milestones passed during Bush’s first term, including the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the new Civil Rights Act.

All of those have been signed into law by Bush but government officials still need to write many of the technical regulations that put them into practice. The new review could lead to narrower interpretations by the government of how those new laws should be carried out.

Some White House officials conceded that the brief suspension of new federal rule-making is designed largely for political effect to aid an Administration under mounting pressures to do something for the slumping economy, but they acknowledged that it is unlikely to have a significant impact. Bush has been chastised by conservatives for abandoning the deregulatory spirit of the Ronald Reagan Administration, and for failure to stop many agencies and federal departments from re-regulating dozens of industries.

In addition, the moratorium may help Bush’s attempts in the 1992 presidential campaign to depict himself as an opponent of big government and Washington bureaucrats in a political season when candidates in both parties sense growing voter disgust with incumbents and the status quo.

Yet Bush faces a dilemma in trying to use the regulatory suspension as a tool to run against Washington: He will be announcing a moratorium on rules that in some cases have been proposed by his own Administration.

Bush’s plan is modeled after a similar suspension imposed by Reagan when he came into the White House in 1981. But unlike Reagan, who was delaying rules issued earlier under a Democratic President, Bush is announcing his moratorium after three years in office.

Sources said the moratorium represents a victory for Administration conservatives, who have long been unhappy with the White House’s failure to oppose efforts by Congress, independent agencies and even Cabinet departments to reverse the deregulatory actions of the Reagan era.

The regulatory suspension will now be designed to redouble the earlier efforts of conservatives--led by Vice President Dan Quayle--to streamline regulations. Over the last three years, Quayle has spearheaded the Administration’s controversial Council on Competitiveness, which has quashed a wide variety of new regulations opposed by business interests.

Now, a new working group led by Bush’s chief economic adviser, Michael J. Boskin, and White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, will review regulations during the moratorium.