It’s not often that there is good regulatory news out of Kansas City, but today there is.

Recently, the city council passed Ordinance No. 260144, repealing and replacing the city’s residential energy code provisions and loosening several of the most burdensome elements of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) implementation. Under the new ordinance, the code will allow lower insulation requirements, a more flexible performance compliance threshold (measured via Home Energy Rating System and Energy Rating Index scores), and the removal of mandatory duct leakage testing when ducts are within the building envelope.

These aren’t just technical tweaks. They speak to the central concern I raised in 2024: that rigid energy mandates can act as a hidden tax on housing supply, particularly at a time when the ability to build more homes quickly and affordably matters to families across the metro.

Dennis Shriver of Hearthside Homes told me the regulatory rollback could reduce new home costs by an average of $15,000.

The bill, sponsored by councilmember (and former Show-Me Institute intern) Nathan Willett, takes effect now that the deadline for Mayor Lucas’s veto has passed.

The original regulation should never have passed, of course, but it is no small victory that despite the damage done to housing construction in the interim, the council had the courage to reverse itself.

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Here’s an overview of some of the legislation passed this session (some of which is still awaiting the governor’s signature):

$50 MILLION FOR MOSCHOLARS PROGRAM

• First public investment in the K–12 scholarship program, with $50 million approved in the state budget
• Could triple the number of students served, expanding access to private school, homeschooling, and
specialized support

TELEHEALTH AND HEALTH CARE REFORMS: SB 79

• Improves telehealth access by allowing both audio-only and audiovisual services on any HIPAAcompliant
platform
• Expands health benefit offerings by allowing certain organizations to offer health plans to members,
sometimes referred to as farm bureau or association health plans, without many of the burdensome state
and federal restrictions that apply to traditional insurance offerings

PROTECTING PROPERTY RIGHTS: HB 595 AND HB 343

• Prohibits cities and counties from requiring landlords to participate in voluntary federal housing
programs such as Section 8 housing vouchers
• Bans caps on security deposits and restrictions on tenant screening criteria like income, credit, and
criminal history

CAPITAL GAINS TAX EXEMPTION: HB 594

• Exempts 100% of long-term capital gains from Missouri state income tax for individuals
• Applies to all individual income reported as capital gains for federal tax purposes, starting tax year 2025
• Designed to encourage investment and entrepreneurship by reducing the tax burden on productive
activity

EXPANDING LICENSE PORTABILITY: SB 150

• Expands access to temporary occupational licenses across most licensed professions in Missouri by
repealing the harmful compact exemption, ensuring that more professionals moving to Missouri can
start working without unnecessary delays
• Provides expedited occupational licenses to law enforcement spouses moving to Missouri, allowing
those licensed in another state for at least one year and in good standing to receive a Missouri license
within 30 days of applying

Download a copy of the report here.

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Well, buried at the end of an uneventful year for U.S. Supreme Court Rulings is a little case called West Virginia v. EPA. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama administration wanted to comprehensively regulate “greenhouse gases” at American power plants under the Clean Air Act, so it adopted what it called the “Clean Power Plan rule.” The rule put pressure on dirtier coal power plants to shutter and promoted alternative energy plants. The problem with that is the Clean Air Act had only ever been used to enable the regulation and oversight of individual power-generating facilities; Congress had not authorized the EPA to unilaterally reorganize all power-generating capacity of the United States at the grid level.

After seven years of legislative wrangling, constant litigation, and a couple of presidential administrations, the Supreme Court affirmed that the EPA had indeed exceeded its mandate under the Clean Air Act. The court found that when a “major question” like nationwide energy generation is to be decided, Congress must render its decision directly or clearly authorize an agency to act on its behalf, consistent with the law. Here, Congress had not spoken directly or made such a clear delegation to the EPA to give it such expansive powers, and because it had not, the EPA’s dramatic rulemaking was invalid.

To be clear, the court’s ruling doesn’t suggest that the federal government can’t regulate “greenhouse gases,” but it does make clear that if the federal government is going to regulate them, Congress needs to clearly authorize it. That’s a win for small and accountable government; this ruling preserves the constitutional norms of our republican form of government. Each of the three branches is constrained by the Constitution; new laws must be passed through Congress, not by bureaucratic fiat.

How do you stop out-of-control regulations like this? Ideally, by requiring some form of legislative action for them to continue. Regulatory reform is a dense and oftentimes boring policy area, but if I were to suggest one change consistent with state and federal constitutional divisions of power, I think it’d be appropriate for every regulation enacted by an agency to come with a sunset date. The sunset provision would wipe the regulation clean if not adopted and passed into law by Congress or a legislature. That way, every regulation would eventually have to get an up or down vote by the people’s representatives, or else disappear.

Regardless, the Supreme Court’s finding in West Virginia is an important one that hopefully will remind lawmakers that they alone should be making “the law”—and that they can, and should, be held accountable for both the laws they pass directly and any regulations that descend from the statutes they enact.

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At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Missouri temporarily relaxed and waived hundreds of regulations to both ease the burden on businesses and allow for an effective pandemic response. This led to an important question: If these regulations are not necessary during trying times, are they necessary during normal times? Do doctors and advanced practice registered nurses really need to be within 75 miles of each other to collaborate? Is it really necessary for certain licensed professionals to receive their continuing education in person at specified locations as opposed to virtually?

Regulations burden businesses and make it harder for workers to get and keep jobs. Red tape hurts our economy and stifles growth, so if a regulation truly isn’t necessary, it should be eliminated.

I’ve previously called for these waivers to be made permanent and it’s good to see some progress during the legislative session. No matter how trivial it may seem to allow to-go cocktails, the larger issue of eliminating unnecessary regulations is a serious one. Other states have already taken steps to eliminate regulations and promote economic growth. This is a small step, but hopefully Missouri will continue to recognize and eliminate harmful regulations.

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One example is Oregon’s Liquor Control Commission, which is taking steps to make the temporary relaxation of some of its rules permanent. Even better, Idaho’s governor is taking action to make a wide array of the state’s COVID-19 deregulation permanent, saying that “if waiving these regulations was deemed necessary to improve public health and welfare during the declared emergency, there is a rebuttable presumption that the regulations are unnecessary or counterproductive outside of the declared emergency.”

Sound familiar?

Show-Me Institute researchers have made this argument many times when speaking favorably of COVID-19 regulatory waivers and when calling for lawmakers to make the waivers permanent. The issue is critical enough that it was included in the Show-Me Institute list of the top issues that ought to be addressed in a special legislative session.

This call for deregulatory action is not a call from left field, nor is it an extraordinary ask. Other states are taking advantage of this opportunity to stay competitive and lessen the burden on businesses and workers. Missouri should too.

The post Other States Are Deregulating. Missouri Should Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I was a little disappointed that the Missourian also went out of its way to portray many NoMORedTape respondents as somehow not grasping the purpose of the site, incharitably citing some of the least informed comments in its article while omitting serious responses. Indeed, I’ve found the vast majority of the comments to be enlightening.

Comments like:

I did not renew my minority women status because they made it so difficult. Faxes are no longer acceptable and the instructions were in a format that I could not open. When I used the password given me it was not acceptable. I gave up because I had no more time to spend on it.

And:

“Certificate of Need” process makes developing critically needed Senior Living buildings a political instead of market-based process. It is costing Missouri many millions of dollars of development. Our $35,000,000 development was just denied Monday in Jefferson City by anti-competition, anti-market political forces. Eliminate the “Certificate of Need” process entirely like almost ALL other states in our Union.

And:

Currently the Missouri Dept. of Elementary & Secondary Education has too strict of rules for teacher and administrator certification, specifically for CTE professionals. In a time when we need more qualified candidates, they are often discouraged by the process.

And:

The University requires vendors to have Liability insurance that covers the University Curators. We print t-shirts, when has anybody sued over a t-shirt? 4 million dollars of liability insurance! This increases our costs and limits the smaller players or unnecessarily burdens the smaller players.

And so on.

Point being, regulatory reform is a serious issue that many serious people take seriously. I hope that public colloquy projects, like NoMORedTape, become more common, not less so, and I appreciate the public policy dividends NoMORedTape has already realized by engaging the public as it has.

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The executive order calls for agencies to pinpoint “at least two” current regulations to be repealed for each new proposed regulation. And it says the net incremental cost for fiscal 2017 should “be no greater than zero,” meaning the cost of new regulations should be offset by existing rules that will be rescinded.

House Speaker Paul Ryan applauded the order in a statement Monday afternoon, noting that it builds on House Republicans’ “Better Way” agenda and comes as the lower chamber is set to repeal a number of Obama era regulations this week.

“The explosion of federal regulations has hamstrung small business growth and crippled our economy,” he said. “President Trump’s executive order helps bring the nation’s regulatory regime into the 21st century by putting regulators on a budget, and addressing the costs agencies can impose each year.”

After the President’s announcement, my colleague Mike McShane reminded me that, in fact, he has talked about precisely the same kind of regulatory reforms in the past. In his case, the context was education. From his US News and World Report piece from last year:

Our Tory compatriots across the pond offer a way forward. In 2010, the Conservative government of the United Kingdom implemented what they called “one in, one out” (later revised to “one in, two out“) that required government to remove a regulation of equivalent compliance cost for every new regulation that they proposed. Want to require a new form to be submitted to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills tracking how businesses recruit new employees? Lovely, not a bother at all. You simply must find another form that takes the same amount of effort or another requirement that takes the same amount of time and eliminate it.

But the regulatory push doesn’t end there, of course. Newly inaugurated governor Eric Greitens has established his own regulatory beach head to fight from, and while it may not be “one in, two out” quite yet, it’s reasonable to believe something similar is on the horizon. That regulatory freeze is important because it halts business as usual in the state bureaucracy and offers an opportunity for a clear-eyed reassessment of what the state is doing well, and doing wrong, in its rulemaking and regulatory processes.

Expect more about good-government regulatory reforms as this year’s session proceeds, but it is refreshing to see that our state and federal governments may soon be getting smaller, one rule at a time.

The post Regulatory Reform Emerges as Major Issue, Nationally and in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now, I’m a big fan of the Pledge of Allegiance. If I had my druthers, American schoolchildren would recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of every school day. In fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing a rousing rendition of God Bless America every Monday morning, now that I think about it. But as the debate wore on, I started to question the wisdom of whether or not we should have a state law requiring it. I started to see this requirement less as a reasonable request from our elected officials and more as a part of a broader trend of regulatory creep.

Most regulations and requirements make sense when they’re looked at in isolation, but they add up. By my count, members of the Missouri legislature filed almost 300 bills related to education this session, all probably reasonable to the folks who drafted them. But if all were enacted, think of the new burdens they would place on teachers and administrators.

As my old friend Rick Hess often tells eager young policy wonks hoping to remake the American education system through new laws and regulation: Government can make schools do things, but it can’t make them do them well. At best, the state legislature can require that the Pledge be part of the schedule, and the state department of education can create a reporting form that requires all 520 of Missouri’s school districts to affirm to the appropriate functionary that they’ve provided time for it, and during audits maybe some bean counter will double check the form. But that’s about it. They certainly can’t make sure the kids hold their hands over their hearts and say the Pledge with pride.

That said, maybe saying the Pledge is so important that even with the limited power that the state legislature has to actually get schools to do what they want, they should still make the requirement and direct the state department of education to do their level best to make sure it is followed. If that is the case, though, how does it compare to all of the other things that the legislature wants schools to do? If there is some conflict between varying requirements, how should schools weigh them against each other?

Our Tory compatriots across the pond offer a way forward. In 2010, the Conservative government of the United Kingdom implemented what they called “one in, one out” (later revised to “one in, two out”) that required government to remove a regulation of equivalent compliance cost for every new regulation that they proposed. Want to require a new form to be submitted to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills tracking how businesses recruit new employees? Lovely, not a bother at all. You simply must find another form that takes the same amount of effort or another requirement that takes the same amount of time and eliminate it.

The same logic could be applied to government regulation of schools. If the legislature wants to require the Pledge of Allegiance, or extra time for reading, or for teachers to have CPR training, they simply have to remove a requirement that takes up the same amount of time or costs the same. The hope would be that this would make lawmakers think before adding new regulations, because for every new idea they have, they and their staff will have to dig around to find something to jettison. It would also give them the opportunity to revisit regulations that still exist in the education code but have outlived their usefulness. Rather than adding on a kludge with every new directive, new requirements that are worthwhile are made doubly so as they also help remove an unneeded requirement. It’s addition by subtraction, and a win-win.

The post Making Regulations Count appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As of last month, the MTC demanded drug tests, specific background checks, and stringent insurance requirements before any ridesharing company could set up in Saint Louis City or County. Since that time, the MTC has backed down on drug testing and has stated that it believes it can resolve issues surrounding insurance. Background checks, including fingerprinting, is the most intransigent remaining problem. In past meetings, the MTC held that Uber’s checks were inadequate. Now the MTC says the main problem is state law:

Fingerprint-Based Criminal Background Checks—Uber is adamant that its own proprietary, Internet-based criminal background checks are more thorough, detailed and reliable than those conducted by law enforcement and based on fingerprint scans of driver applicants. We [MTC] can argue back and forth as to which position is correct. But it matters little what MTC thinks, or what Uber desires. Fingerprint-based criminal background checks conducted by the Missouri Highway Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are the law of the land. And Missouri statutes governing the MTC mandate such checks.

Uber has stated that its own background checks are thorough, and the MTC’s checks may prevent UberX from entering the Saint Louis market.

This post cannot comment on whether the MTC’s interpretation of the law is correct. However, if state law governing the MTC does need to change to allow more flexible background checks, state policymakers should consider such a reform. There is no reason Saint Louis residents cannot decide for themselves whether Uber’s background checks meet their needs.

Should the state legislature decide to reform laws governing the MTC, there is no reason to stop at background check requirements. They should consider eliminating provisions that require four of nine MTC commissioners to be taxi industry representatives. They could also curtail the regulatory powers of the commission to consumer protection provisions, which is all the MTC says it wants anyway. However, given the past performance of the MTC and its recent dysfunction, perhaps the best reform state legislators could make would be to disband the body altogether. 

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It always makes for interesting reading, and this year’s edition (released last week) is no exception. Missouri’s economic performance has bounced along RSPS’s bottom quintile of states since its first edition, and unfortunately Missouri hasn’t made much progress since 2008; Missouri now ranks 42nd of 50 states in economic performance for 2015. That finding is consistent with economic assessments we’ve shared with readers in the past. Simply put, the state hasn’t made a lot of economic progress over the last decade relative to its peers.

Missouri is seeing movement in its “economic outlook”—but it’s all in the wrong direction. In 2012 Missouri ranked 7th for how bright its economic future appeared, which at the time I noted that the ranking looked a bit like an aberration. Only three years on, however, the state has dropped back to 27th overall. That is the worst Missouri has ever done in RSPS’s outlook ranking, dating all the way back to 2008 when the state ranked 25th. Suffice it to say, a weak economic track record paired with a mediocre economic outlook doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the status quo.

The fact is not a whole lot changed from 2013 to today, which is sort of the problem. States across the country are pursuing tax cuts and regulatory reforms in earnest, and yet Missouri has been slow to respond for years. Last year’s tax cut was an important first step toward turning the economic tide, but it is too small and being too slowly instituted to be a last step. Time is running out for the legislature to do much on the tax issue this year; it will be interesting to see if the body chooses to do nothing.

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