RED TAPE Act

Proponents argue this bill eliminates 'regulatory overreach' by preventing agencies from inflating costs through unmeasurable harms, claiming it ensures taxpayers receive clear monetary value from regulations. Critics argue this bill blinds regulators to real costs: prevented deaths, avoided illness, ecosystem services, and equity considerations that are difficult to monetize but catastrophic if ignored. The non-partisan evidence shows: (1) Federal agencies have refined cost-benefit methodology over decades; (2) OMB Circular A-4 already requires monetization where feasible but permits non-monetized factors as supplements—not primary drivers; (3) this bill conflates 'unquantified' (difficult to measure) with 'fabricated' (false); (4) retroactive judicial invalidation of rules issued since November 2023 creates massive legal uncertainty for recently finalized regulations on air quality, vehicle emissions, and workplace safety. The bill does not address whether non-monetized benefits are sometimes more defensible than monetized estimates (e.g., assigning dollar value to a human life involves inherently arbitrary assumptions).