Cabinet members push back on Scott regulation freeze

Gov. Rick Scott took office on an anti-regulation crusade, making one of his first official acts an executive order that suspended all rulemaking for agencies under the direction of the governor.

Executive Order No. 11-01 established the Office of Fiscal Accountability and Regulatory Reform to examine proposed and existing rules and regulations to determine, among other things, if they "unreasonably affect job creation or job retention" and to analyze the impact on public health and safety and costs for businesses. If the rules impede job creation, the theory was, they would be jettisoned.

The executive order was meant to fulfill Scott's campaign promise to "freeze all regulations."

We ruled that promise In the Works on Scott's first day in office, Jan. 4, 2011, noting that there was still some question whether the governor's executive order would have a broad enough impact to meet Scott's sweeping promise.

We got our answer in the editions of the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald on Jan. 14.

And the answer is, it doesn't.

While rulemaking is being suspended, or frozen, in the offices and state agencies Scott controls, that's hardly the whole of state government.

Scott had asked state agencies not under his control to voluntarily "consent to the pre-authorization process."

On Jan. 14, the three members of the Cabinet, all Republicans -- Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam -- told the Times/Herald's Janet Zink that they would not comply with Scott's request to have pending regulations in their offices frozen and then reviewed by the governor's office before becoming effective.

A spokeswoman for Atwater said his office will review its rules and regulations "following their own standards."  Putnam spokesman Sterling Ivey said something similar.

"We are not sending our rules to the governor's office," Ivey said. "We are looking at all of our rules internally to make sure they align with the direction the commissioner wants to go with the department."

And a spokeswoman for Bondi said the attorney general supports Scott's call for a cost-benefit analysis of rules. But she'll take care of her part of it herself.

"Consistent with the intent and spirit of Gov. Scott's executive order, the attorney general has ordered that her staff review all of our agency's existing and proposed rules to ensure that they are necessary and justified," said Jennifer Krell Davis in a prepared statement. "Because our agency will be conducting this independent review, we will not be submitting our rules to the governor's office."

On top of that, Scott's order does not cover the state agencies administered by the governor and Cabinet together, like the Department of Veterans' Affairs, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and the Department of Revenue.

So while Scott has been able to essentially freeze regulations, pending a review, for the agencies he controls, much of the state government is operating without abiding by that formal order. And the members of the Cabinet, who control their own agencies and share control of others with the governor, have said that they are reviewing their own rules and they will not comply with Scott's request.

Scott promised during the campaign to freeze all regulations, but upon taking office, he's faced a grim reality: He can't direct the practices of the entire state government. So we rate this a Compromise.