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Piles of regulations
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Posted on May 10 2000
At Issue: Piles of regulations that have been posted in the CNMI’s registry and deemed approved after a certain period.
Our View: The Legislature must guard policymaking in order to prevent Tom, Dick and Harry from strangling NMI to death!
A young scholar on public policy once quizzed if policymaking has gotten out of hand. He’s alluding to a research on federal regulations some 40,000 of which were promulgated and approved in the last decade alone by various federal agencies.
In the first instance, if public policies are formulated to protect and benefit the majority’s interest, then it goes without saying that it should be kept to a minimum. Each policy should be thoroughly researched and given reasoned analysis before final disposition. Such role is primarily the purview of the bicameral legislature of the CNMI.
But even at this level (solely the preserve of our legislative institution), there are agencies from within and without who also promulgate rules and regulations beyond what spews out of the two chambers on Capital Hill. This is worth reviewing by the committees on judiciary to determine if the NMI hasn’t literally been strangled itself to death by heaps of ridiculous regulations.
Indeed, over the past several years we have seen the approval of protectionist measures that have at best, stifled expansion of current investments; at worse, discouraged additional lasting investments from without. We were too busy giving ad hoc consideration to policy matters, the net effect being thoughtless measures that have shut down any further investments from well-meaning investors.
Policymakers should review policy promulgation and approval over the last decade and do away with any and all regulations that have done nothing but strangled windows of opportunities to allow expansion of current investments. The same should be done with visions of luring investments from the Information Technology now under review.
The House Leadership has begun laying out the groundwork for the IT and it should also make it a point to review non-legislative policies that have piled up over the years in the Commonwealth Registry. Si Yuus Maase`!
