A powerful House committee recently released a report blasting the EPA for implementing “job killing” regulations, including those stemming from the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA).

In a Feb. 9 report addressing regulatory impediments to job creation, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform focused on the EPA and its “burdensome” regulations. The preliminary staff report listed 85 federal regulations identified by an open survey of industry and trade groups as “onerous” and “an impediment” to their growth, 60 of which came from the EPA.

Among the EPA policies that drew scorn from business interests were variations in the fertilizer retailer exemption from EPCRA, the proposed regulation of coal ash as a hazardous waste, a proposed rule that would modify the articles exemption in the Toxics Release Inventory, proposed revisions to the Inventory Update Rule under the Toxic Substances Control Act and plans for new regulation of hydraulic fracturing.

The 97-page report — Assessing Regulatory Impediments to Job Creation  — includes a 24-page appendix listing each regulation and which companies or trade groups cited it as an impediment in the survey. While the EPA wasn’t the report’s only target — it devoted sections to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Department of Labor and the Food and Drug Administration — it reserved most of its wrath for the agency.

“The lack of clarity from the federal government causes paralysis in the industry,” the report said in its discussion of industrial recycling. “In some cases, the administration has proposed a regulatory burden that appears on its face impossible to meet.”

The report noted that sometimes the difficulty comes not from a single regulation, but rather the confluence of multiple, occasionally contradictory, regulations. “When several of these massive regulations are piled on top of one another for an industry, the cumulative impact can be overwhelming,” the report stated. “The result: industries are effectively regulated out of business.”

For more information, see the March edition of the Community Right-To-Know Manual.