WASHINGTON-President Clinton late last week signed legislation to give small businesses more leverage to challenge regulations of the Federal Communications Commission and other government agencies.
The measure is a scaled-back version of regulatory reform included in the Contract with America Advancement Act of 1996 that the GOP-led Congress passed Thursday.
“The administration strongly supports H.R. 3136 and urges the Congress to send it to the president immediately to prevent a default by the United States on its financial obligations,” said the White House.
The bill, approved 328 to 91 by the House and seconded by the Senate, also increases the federal debt ceiling from $4.9 trillion to $5.5 trillion for the next 18 months, averting a first-ever national default.
The FCC must take into account the impact of its rulemakings on small businesses. In the past, that determination was not in itself a sufficient basis for a small business to lodge an appeal. Now, small businesses can challenge that impact statement.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the rest of the Republican leadership have had to settle for far less than they promised in the Contract with America after taking control of both houses for the first time in 40 years following the 1994 midterm election.
“Many were counting us out by the end of last year,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) told the Associated Press. “But we are back.”
Fellow Texas congressman Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat, expressed a different view to the wire service. “If this is an advance of the Contract with America … then some of our Republican colleagues can’t tell backwards from forwards.”
Meanwhile, three-way budget negotiations among congressional Republicans and Democrats and the White House continued late into last week on a spending bill to fund the FCC and scores of other federal offices for the rest of this fiscal year.
Prospects on agreement were unclear on Friday when short-term funding for much of the federal government expires, suggesting Congress would likely pass yet another stop-gap spending bill to avoid a third government shutdown.
Gingrich, whose party has been hurt by the two previous shutdowns, has vowed to not let it happen again. Congress is out the next two weeks for the Easter-Passover break.
The FCC has been without permanent funding since the new fiscal year began on Oct. 1. The agency more recently has been operating at $175 million, the level reached by House-Senate conferees last year in the Commerce appropriations bill vetoed by Clinton.
The House version of a new bill to keep the FCC and other federal agencies running for the next six months keeps the commission at $175 million, while the Senate allots $20 million more.
The Clinton administration wants the FCC funded at $223 million in fiscal 1997 and proposes to auction toll-free 888 numbers, an initiative strongly opposed by the wireless telecommunications industry. The collapse of negotiations for a seven-year balanced budget bill has delayed the expansion of the FCC’s auction authority to encompass private wireless and possibly TV broadcast spectrum.
