Cummings presses trade groups for replies to Issa query

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s top Democrat is pressing trade associations – including energy groups – for their replies to Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) recent request for lists of federal rules the groups find burdensome.

Issa in December sent letters to roughly 150 trade groups, companies and think tanks asking them about regulations as he prepared his oversight agenda.

But Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, said Monday that Issa has refused to share the responses he has received, noting that Issa instead claimed he will release them by Feb. 11, when he’ll make them public along with a GOP staff analysis.

As a result, Cummings has directly asked the recipients of Issa’s query for their responses – if they’ve completed them – by Feb. 3. He said in letters to the groups that Democrats need their responses to prepare for the hearing Issa plans to hold in coming weeks.

“I fully support bipartisan efforts to improve federal regulations to increase job growth while preserving the core safeguards these regulations were intended to protect,” Cummings states in the letters. 

“But since Chairman Issa has refused to provide Democrats with copies of the industry responses he has received to date, we have no choice but to request them ourselves. Withholding Committee records is not only a violation of House rules, but a waste of time that could have been avoided with the smallest degree of bipartisan cooperation,” he adds.

The roughly 150 corporations, trade groups and think tanks Issa queried include a substantial number of energy companies and energy trade associations, such as the Edison Electric Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, Duke Energy and ExxonMobil.