00:00The ranking member of the full committee, the gentleman from New Jersey, five minutes for questions.
00:05Thank you, Chairman Latta. As I mentioned in my opening statement, I am concerned about a number
00:09of actions the Trump administration has taken that FIMS in its first six months, and one of those
00:14was clawing back a leak detection rule finalized in the last days of the Biden administration.
00:21And I want to be clear, the rule was finalized and done, but the Trump administration instructed
00:25the Federal Register not to publish the rule, and has since clawed it back. So I just want
00:31to point out to some of our newer members that this rule was required by a bipartisan law
00:38that President Trump himself signed. That law required that FIMS to put forward a final rule
00:43within a year of enactment, and four years after the law was signed, President Trump prevented
00:47the rule from being finalized. So, Mr. Karam, could you talk about the importance of the
00:54leak detection rule? Did it have buy-in from industry and public stakeholders? Did the
00:59Trump administration's decision make us safer?
01:02Yeah, thank you for the question. That rule was negotiated, discussed over two weeks of advisory
01:13committee meetings with multiple stakeholder groups, industry, public, and government. There
01:20were a lot of unanimous votes. Not all of the votes were unanimous, but many of them were. And I would
01:27say consensus was reached on the vast majority of the issues in leak detection and repair. And that rule
01:35was due, as you said, a year after. That would have been in December of 2021. So it is years overdue now.
01:41So it was really disappointing to see it pulled back from being published.
01:45And what about my question about did that decision by the Trump administration make us safer?
01:52No, no. We continue to have incidents from known leaks. There are regulations on specifically what kind
02:03of equipment operators need to use. And the regulations around grading leaks as to how quickly they need to be
02:12repaired are vague. And that rule would have established those standards and, I believe, made pipelines safer.
02:21Well, thank you. Now, I want to turn to a potential priority for a pipeline safety reauthorization bill.
02:27As you pointed out in your written testimony, FIMS safety rules are subject to a duplicative cost-benefit analysis
02:34over and beyond the one already required for all other federal rules. And this isn't a hypothetical problem.
02:41GPA midstream, one of the witnesses represented here today, has used this at the D.C. Circuit Court to kill pipeline safety rules.
02:48And to me, that's unacceptable. So, Mr. Karam, would you talk about how this duplicative requirement harms public safety
02:56and whether Congress should look at removing this requirement in a reauthorization bill?
03:00As far as I'm aware, FIMS is the only safety agency with this statutory cost-benefit requirement that is duplicative over the executive order.
03:10It's difficult to do cost-benefit on low-frequency, high-consequence failures like you see with pipelines.
03:20And it hamstrings FIMS from making real progress on safety. As you've mentioned, multiple rules over the last several years
03:27have been rolled back by the courts saying that FIMS didn't fully justify the cost with benefits.
03:32And the benefits in many of these cases are human lives.
03:36Well, thank you. I just want to mention to my Republican colleagues, because they keep talking about a bipartisan bill.
03:44But if we're really going to have a bipartisan bill on this issue, it has to be solely, and I stress solely, about increasing safety.
03:52You know, the Committee of Republicans Pipeline Safety Bill failed last Congress because it was not drafted, in my opinion, in a collaborative manner,
04:02and included partisan provisions related to pipeline siting as opposed to safety.
04:07So that's, you know, it's not going to be bipartisan if it deals with siting and other issues other than safety.
04:13So I just hope we can see a more collaborative process this year, Mr. Chairman.
04:18And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.
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