Small: Oklahoma needs regulatory reform

Oklahoma needs regulatory reform

By Jonathan Small

A major focus of this year’s legislative session centers on reducing excessive government regulation.

House Bill 2728, by state Rep. Gerrid Kendrix and state Sen. Micheal Bergstrom, would create the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act of 2025.

Under the bill, any state agency rule with an economic impact of $1 million or more over a five-year period would face extra scrutiny and oversight from the Legislature.

Yet some question why Oklahoma needs this reform. The answer is simple: Because Oklahoma state agencies are as prone to overreach as government agencies in other parts of the country.

Here are just a few examples from recent years.

In 2020, after Oklahoma’s COVID restrictions were quickly lifted, our Health Department nonetheless created a rule designed to prevent thousands of medical patients from receiving treatment, impairing patients’ health and the finances of thousands of medical professionals.

Oklahoma lawmakers and voters wisely opted not to create a state exchange for Obamacare policies or any other information-exchange purposes. However, years later bureaucrats at the Oklahoma Healthcare Authority created a rule that was going to cost over $30 million a year to effectively create a health information exchange by rule. Other states that have attempted Obamacare and other systems like this have experienced significant cost overruns. The OHCA rule would have required that data and information about every medical claim in Oklahoma be submitted to the Oklahoma Health Care Authority – for a fee.

Once the Oklahoma Board of Pharmacy advanced a rule to newly regulate hundreds of businesses without properly providing notice and then errantly triggered those businesses’ investigation by the federal government.

The Oklahoma Tax Commission once sought to pass a rule requiring any school accepting students who use parental choice tax credits to comply with various local and state ordinances, including ordinances in dispute. That was going to impose millions in new costs for private schools and reduce the number of children served.

In each of the above cases the rule either went into effect, or almost went into effect, and it took an intense lobbying effort to defeat or roll back those cases of regulatory overreach.

With a REINS act, similar problems would occur far less frequently in the future, and agencies would operate knowing they are subject to serious oversight.

Unfortunately, a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that Oklahoma is already the 17th-most regulated state in the country. We should not wait until regulatory overreach is rampant and hitting crisis levels before imposing credible safeguards.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.