ATLANTA — State Republican Senators are backing a bill they claim will reduce red tape for Georgia businesses and state agencies. But Democrats insist it actually adds some red tape.
Senate Democrats are promising a fight to stop what Republicans are calling the Red Tape Rollback Act from becoming law.
In a morning hearing on Wednesday, Forsyth County Republican Sen. Greg Dolezal introduced the bill that he insists does not create a Georgia version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but does create a level of legislative oversight for state agencies.
“What it doesn’t do is place any sort of new agency in place or grow government in such a way that there’s an agency over the shoulder of an existing agency,” Dolezal said.
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Under this bill, if the legislature passes a rule or regulation for a state agency and an economic assessment shows it costs more than $1 million, that rule gets paused and it has to come back to the legislature for another approval.
“We definitely want to make sure that the rules that are expensive to comply with are adjudicated and then elected officials are the ones that are ultimately making that decision, not bureaucrats that nobody gets to see,” Dolezal said.
But Democrats say all this bill does is slow down the process and give the general assembly more control over state agencies, leading to cuts and eventually elimination of those agencies.
“As Democrats, we’re going to stand in the way. We’re going to fight. We’re going to continue to let the public know what the attempts are from the Lieutenant Governor as well as Republicans in the general assembly,” Emmanuel Jones said.
The bill also requires state agencies to comb through its rules and regulations every four years to get rid of old, out-of-date rules or regulations.
The bill passed out of that committee on Wednesday morning.
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