WATCH Act
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Sen. Schmitt, Eric [R-MO]
ID: S001227
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
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Bill Summary
Another brilliant example of Congressional theater, masquerading as a genuine attempt to improve animal welfare. The WATCH Act, how quaint. Let's dissect this farce.
**New Regulations:** Quarterly inspections for foreign laboratories conducting biomedical and behavioral research, because apparently, we can't trust those pesky foreigners to treat animals humanely without our guidance.
**Affected Industries and Sectors:** Research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and any other entities that dare to conduct animal testing outside the United States. You know, the ones who actually do the dirty work while our politicians virtue-signal about animal welfare.
**Compliance Requirements and Timelines:** Laboratories must establish animal care committees, review and evaluate animal care and treatment, and maintain proper record-keeping and reporting procedures. Oh, and they'll need to pass quarterly inspections, because we all know how well that's worked in the past (cough, FDA, cough).
**Enforcement Mechanisms and Penalties:** The Secretary of Health and Human Services will designate an inspecting authority, which will issue certifications of compliance. Laboratories that fail to comply will be given a "reasonable opportunity" to correct their mistakes before facing suspension or revocation of funding. How very... diplomatic.
**Economic and Operational Impacts:** This bill will undoubtedly increase costs for research institutions and pharmaceutical companies, as they'll need to allocate resources for these new inspections and compliance measures. But hey, who needs affordable medicine when we can have more bureaucratic red tape?
Now, let's get to the real diagnosis: this bill is a classic case of "Regulatory Capture-itis." It's a disease where politicians create regulations that benefit special interest groups (in this case, animal welfare organizations) while pretending to serve the greater good. The symptoms include:
* Increased costs for industries * More bureaucratic hurdles * Virtue-signaling politicians
The treatment? A healthy dose of skepticism and a strong stomach for the inevitable unintended consequences.
In conclusion, the WATCH Act is just another example of our esteemed lawmakers' ability to create more problems while pretending to solve others. Bravo, Congress. You've done it again.
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
â 438 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and their membership has too often been handpicked to achieve certain politi- cal positions. In the Biden Administration, key EPA advisory committees were purged of balanced perspectives, geographic diversity, important regulatory and private-sector experience, and state, local, and tribal expertise. Contrary to con- gressional directives and recommendations from the GAO and intergovernmental associations, these moves eviscerated historic levels of participation on key com- mittees by state, local, and tribal members from 2017 to 2020. As a result, a variety of EPA regulations lack relevant scientific perspectives, increasing the risks of economic fallout and a failure of cooperative federalism. EPA also has repeatedly disregarded legal requirements regarding the role of these advisory committees and the scope of scientific advice on key regulations.46 Needed Science Policy Reforms Instead of allowing these efforts to be misused for scaremongering risk com- munications and enforcement activities, EPA should embrace so-called citizen science and deputize the public to subject the agencyâs science to greater scrutiny, especially in areas of data analysis, identification of scientific flaws, and research misconduct. In addition, EPA should: l Shift responsibility for evaluating misconduct away from its Office of Scientific Integrity, which has been overseen by environmental activists, and toward an independent body. l Work (including with Congress) to provide incentives similar to those under the False Claims Act47 for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct, thereby saving taxpayers from having to bear the costs involved in expending unnecessary resources. l Avoid proprietary, black box models for key regulations. Nearly all major EPA regulations are based on nontransparent models for which the public lacks access or for which significant costs prevent the public from understanding agency analysis. l Reject precautionary default models and uncertainty factors. In the face of uncertainty around associations between certain pollutants and health or welfare endpoints, EPAâs heavy reliance on default assumptions like its low-dose, linear non-threshold model bake orders of magnitude of risk into key regulatory inputs and drive flawed and opaque decisions. Given the disproportionate economic impacts of top-down solutions, EPA should implement an approach that defaults to less restrictive regulatory outcomes. â 439 â Environmental Protection Agency l Refocus its research activities on accountable real-world examinations of the efficacy of its regulations with a heavy emphasis on characterizing and better understanding natural, background, international, and anthropogenic contributions for key pollutants. It should embrace concepts laid out in the 2018 âBack-to-Basics Process for Reviewing National Ambient Air Quality Standardsâ memo48 to ensure that any science and risk assessment for the NAAQS matches congressional direction. Legislative Reforms While some reforms can be achieved administratively (especially in areas where EPA clearly lacks congressional authorization for its activities), Congress should prioritize several EPA science activity reforms: l Use of the Congressional Review Act for Congress to disapprove of EPA regulations and other quasi-regulatory actions and prohibit âsubstantially similarâ actions in the future. l Reform EPAâs Science Advisory Board and other advisory bodies to ensure independence, balance, transparency, and geographic diversity. l Build on recent bipartisan proposals to increase transparency for advisory bodies, subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act49 as well as recommendations from the Administrative Conference of the U.S., to strengthen provisions for independence, accountability, geographic diversity, turnover, and public participation. This should include a prohibition on peer review activities for unaccountable third parties that lack independence or application of these same principles to non- governmental peer review bodies (including NASEM). l Add teeth to long-standing executive orders, memoranda, recommendations, and other policies to require that EPA regulations are based on transparent, reproducible science as well as that the data and publications resulting from taxpayer-funded activities are made immediately available to the public. l Reject funds for programs that have not been authorized by Congress (like IRIS) as well as peer review activities that have not been authorized by Congress. l Revisit and repeal or reform outdated environmental statutes. A high priority should be the repeal or reform of the Global Change Research Act of 1990,50 which has been misused for political purposes.
Introduction
â 284 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise âobservational studies,â and declared that everyone except children and infants below the age of two should don masks. Under COVID, as former director of HHSâs Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as âperhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.â Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, âDespite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experimentsââin which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, âand gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.â Severino writes that âAnthony Fauciâs division of the NIHââthe National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasesââowns half the patent for the Moderna COVID- 19 vaccine,â and âseveral NIH employeesâ receive âup to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.â That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials. The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makersâwith all of the conflict of interest it entailsâcannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, âFunding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.â Whatâs more, NIH has long âbeen at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.â The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the departmentâs foray into woke transgen- der activism. HHS also pushes abortion as a form of âhealth care,â skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process. Severino writes that the âFDA shouldâŚreverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the polit- icized approval process was illegal from the start.â In addition, HHS programs often violate the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of conscience-protection laws. Severino writes that the HHS âSecretary should pursue a robust agenda to pro- tect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.â The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administrationâs focus on ââLGBTQ+ equity,â subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,â replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. If there is another department that has gone off the rails like HHS during the Obama and Biden Administrations, it is the once proud Department of Justice (DOJ). As former counselor to the attorney general Gene Hamilton writes in Chap- ter 17, the department âhas a long and noble historyââEdmund Randolph, the first attorney general, took office the same year as President Washingtonâyet its â 285 â Section 3: The General Welfare longstanding reputation has been marred by the Biden Administrationâs abuse of the departmentâs powers for its own ends. Hamilton writes that the departmentâs âunprecedented politicization and weaponizationâ under Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, resulting in âpolitically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutionsâ of political enemies and indifference to the crimes of political allies, has made the department âa threat to the Republic.â The most important thing for the next attorney general to do is to refocus the department on its core functions of âprotecting public safety and defending the rule of law,â while restoring its âvalues of independence, impartiality, honesty, integrity, respect, and excellence.â This is especially true of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). A bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization, especially at the top, âthe FBI views itself as an independent agencyâ that is âon par with the Attorney General,â rather than as an agency that is under the AG and fully accountable to him or her. To rein in this âcompletely out of controlâ bureau and remind it of its place withinârather than at the top ofâthe DOJ hierarchy, Hamilton writes that the FBIâs separate Office of General Counsel (with âapproximately 300 attorneysâ), separate Office of Legislative Affairs, and separate Office of Public Affairs should all be abolished. Requiring the FBI to get its legal advice from the wider department âwould serve as a crucial check on an agency that has recently pushed past legal boundary after legal boundary.â Indeed, Hamilton writes, â[t]he next conservative Administra- tion should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress.â Elsewhere, DOJ should target violent and career criminals, not parents; work to dismantle criminal organizations, partly by rigorously prosecuting interstate drug activity; and restart the Trump Administrationâs âChina Initiativeâ (to address Chinese espionage and theft of trade secrets), which the Biden Administration âter- minatedâŚlargely out of a concern for poor âoptics.ââ It should also enforce existing federal law that prohibits mailing abortifacients, rather than harassing pro-life demonstrators; respect the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech, rather than trying to police speech on the internet; and enforce federal immigra- tion laws, rather than pretending there is no border. In contrast to DOJâs long history, the Department of Education (the depart- ment, or ED), discussed by Lindsey Burke in Chapter 11, is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, whichâas the COVID era showedâis not particularly concerned with childrenâs education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrinationâand the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.
Introduction
â 437 â Environmental Protection Agency l Suspend and review the activities of EPA advisory bodies, many of which have not been authorized by Congress or lack independence, balance, and geographic and viewpoint diversity. l Retract delegations for key science and risk-assessment decisions from Assistant Administrators, regional offices, and career officials. l Eliminate the use of Title 42 hiring authority that allows ORD to spend millions in taxpayer dollars for salaries of certain employees above the civil service scale. l Announce plans to streamline and reform EPAâs poorly coordinated and managed laboratory structure. Budget: Back-to-Basics Rejection of Unauthorized or Expired Science Activities A top priority should be the immediate and consistent rejection of all EPA ORD and science activities that have not been authorized by Congress. In FY 2022, according to EPAâs opaque budgeting efforts, science and technology activ- ities totaled nearly $730 million. EPAâs FY 2023 budget request for the Office of Research and Development seeks funds for more than 1,850 employeesâa dramatic increase for what is already the largest EPA office with well above 10 percent of the agencyâs workforce.44 ORD conducts a wide-ranging series of science and peer review activities, some in support of regulatory programs established by our envi- ronmental laws, but often lacks authority for these specific endeavors. Several ORD offices and programs, many of which constitute unaccountable efforts to use scientific determinations to drive regulatory, enforcement, and legal decisions, should be eliminated. The Integrated Risk Information System, for example, was ostensibly designed by EPA to evaluate hazard and dose-response for certain chemicals. Despite operating since the 1980s, the program has never been authorized by Congress and often sets âsafe levelsâ based on questionable science and below background levels, resulting in billions in economic costs. The program has been criticized by a wide variety of stakeholders: states; Congress; the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM); and the U.S. Govern- ment Accountability Office (GAO), among others. EPA has failed to implement meaningful reforms, and this unaccountable program threatens key regulatory processes as well as the integrity of Clean Air Act and TSCA implementation. Needed EPA Advisory Body Reforms EPA currently operates 21 federal advisory committees.45 These committees often play an outsized role in determining agency scientific and regulatory policy,
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About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.