GOP Seeks Moratorium on New Federal Regulations : Policy: New Republican congressional leaders join forces to press the Clinton Administration to ban issuing any new rules for 100 days.

The new Republican leaders of the House and Senate, joining forces for the first time on a high-profile legislative issue, called on the Clinton Administration Monday not to issue any new federal regulations during the first 100 days of the 104th Congress.

The GOP proposal would take away one of the executive branch’s most potent powers at a time when there is significant political momentum for legislative measures that would roll back federal regulations and bar new ones.

In a letter sent to the White House on Monday, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), urged President Clinton to issue an executive order, effective immediately, that would impose a moratorium on new federal rules that govern everything from air pollution to airline travel to banking transactions.

At the same time, the House and Senate leaders asked Clinton to direct Cabinet secretaries to rout out unnecessary or inefficient regulations already on the books and provide Congress with the internal analyses supporting its rule-making decisions.

A White House spokeswoman said it was too early for the White House to react to the proposal.

“We will take a look at it--obviously we’ll take a careful look at anything that comes from the congressional leadership,” said White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. “But we don’t have any response to it at this time.”

The 100-day period coincides with a Republican timetable for acting on a range of promised legislation designed, among other things, to lighten the regulatory burden imposed on the economy by Washington. Republicans on Monday cited private estimates suggesting that abiding by all federal regulations costs American industry between $588 billion and $860 billion annually and constitutes a “hidden tax” that imposes an “enormous burden on our economy.”

The proposed moratorium appeared designed to thwart many agencies’ plans to bypass what they see as a new, Republican-dominated Congress hostile to strictures on businesses. Many agencies had hoped to move quickly to tighten some public health and safety protections through the issuance of regulations, which are interpretations of laws, rather than ask Congress to reform the laws themselves.

In one of the most controversial regulatory proposals in the works, the Food and Drug Administration has been drafting regulations that could affect the lucrative tobacco industry by defining nicotine as a drug. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency has said it would propose new regulations to assure the purity of drinking water, and Interior Department officials have discussed ways to tighten environmental rules on the mining industry through the regulatory process.

The lawmakers said that any moratorium should exclude regulations that “respond to emergencies such as those that pose an imminent danger to human health or safety.”

Senate Republicans, flexing their new political muscle, said they believed Clinton would have little choice but to take them up on their challenge.

“I think (members of the Clinton Administration) see change coming and reforms bigger than they anticipated having to consider and say: ‘The ground is shifting beneath us. We’d better reinvent government more,’ ” said Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), one of eight GOP congressional leaders who signed the letter. “It seems we ought to explore some ways to work together to meet the objectives the President is now talking about. . . . We’re suggesting something he may very well be able to do or want to do, judging by his recent statements.”

The leaders’ bold gesture came as House and Senate lawmakers prepared a raft of proposals designed to roll back regulation. That objective is one of the House Republicans’ “contract with America” items, and is expected to be a major theme among Republican presidential candidates in the coming election campaign.

Cochran said Dole and Gingrich, who have had strained relations in the past, had joined forces to press for the moratorium “because this is such a high priority.”