EXCLUSIVE - Former Attorney General William Barr is preparing to battle the Biden administration's "bureaucratic overreach and excessive regulation" that he says is crippling to American business.
Barr will chair the advisory board of the Center for Legal Action, a new project launched last week by the conservative American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce that aims to rein in excessive federal rulemaking.
"The Left likes to talk about threats to democracy, but the use of the regulatory process to impose these major changes on the United States is the ultimate end run around democracy instead of having Congress, the people's representatives, make the decisions about these fundamental rules that will bind society," Barr said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
"They have these unaccountable and frequently non-transparent, bureaucracies promulgate these rules, and so that's a big end run," he said.
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Barr, who served as attorney general under presidents George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, says the Center for Legal Action will be involved "in all stages of the regulatory process in Washington before the federal agencies that implement them, before Congress, and before the courts."
"For the last 20 years, but certainly under Biden, there's been a huge upsurge in regulation and the burden of regulation on American companies and on the economy," Barr said. "And there's an increasing attempt to bypass the democratic process by having all of these major rules that will have a dramatic impact on our society, having them promulgated by bureaucracies rather than go through the legislative process."
Federal rules and regulations are based on federal law but are written by unelected officials in federal agencies who can interpret the law in ways that Congress didn't intend.
Barr said the goal of the center is "to beat back bureaucratic overreach and excessive regulation and to do that using every tool possible." He said that includes trying to get Congress to "pare back on the ambitions of the bureaucrats, but also where that fails to fight out the regulatory process in the agencies themselves and then eventually sue them in court."
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Barr said the center will tackle a wide range of federal regulations, including rules aimed at eliminating internal combustion engines in 10 years that force Americans to buy expensive electric vehicles, to rules threatening to put Maine lobstermen out of business.
"There are a lot of industries and sectors that can be devastated by a rule that most of America doesn't even hear about," Barr said.
"Sometimes they can be, you know, industrial sectors that are specialized, other times they can be smaller businesses, like lobstermen," he said. "And they don't have a strong voice in Washington… so part of what this group is going to try to do is target these regulations that can be devastating to small business and to particular sectors of the economy," he said.
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The group will also target rules that not only disadvantage American business, but also "gratuitously benefits" U.S. competitors, like China.
He said one example of that is a Biden administration rule intended to encourage electric vehicle production that ultimately makes the United States dependent on Chinese-manufactured electric batteries.
"When we've succeeded in getting robust economic growth in our country, it's been during periods where there are administrations that are far more disciplined in putting out regulations. And now you have people trying to redesign the entire economy through these rules," said Barr.
