Rules, regulations and red tape aren’t just annoying — they cost a bundle. That’s the conclusion of a new study by my colleague Wayne Crews. His Ten Thousand Commandments report for 2022 calculates that the cost of federal regulation is almost $2 trillion — working out at $14,000 per household. Worse, the president keeps announcing new initiatives that will add to this burden. The new Congress must say enough is enough and put a stop to this ever-expanding, ever more costly administrative state.
We’re not talking about laws passed by Congress here, but a different form of law called regulation. Congress often passes laws and leaves it up to executive branch agencies to decide the details of implementation and enforcement. The laws say “The secretary shall…” and that cabinet secretary then directs his agency’s bureaucrats to devise regulations to fill in the gaps in the statute.
Those regulations have the force of law and are supposed to go through a procedure in which an agency publishes a draft regulation, gives members of the public and other affected parties the opportunity to comment on the regulation’s effects, takes those comments into account, and publishes a revised, final draft that takes legal effect.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way. All too often, the final draft is not noticeably different from the first. Agencies might ignore objections, even when they are valid. Sometimes the law is impossibly vague, which gives bureaucrats wide latitude to do as they please.
Increasingly, agencies don’t even bother with the notice-and-comment procedure, which is required under the Administrative Procedure Act. Instead, they issue “guidance” documents that may not be legally binding in a purely technical sense, but heaven help you if you ignore them.
Then there are “interpretations” of the law or existing regulations that completely change them. The infamous “bathroom rule” was issued as a “Dear Colleague” letter. The Obama administration would even announce changes to the law by blog post.
There is a strong argument that this messy process is unconstitutional. The Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress, and the legal doctrine of nondelegation stipulates that Congress may not delegate that power to the executive branch. This concept— which is key to the separation of powers — will probably be tested in several cases coming to the Supreme Court in the coming years.
In the meantime, however, the current administration is pushing regulation to the limits. It has announced several “whole of government” initiatives deploying regulation to pursue agendas like climate policy, restrictions on employers and independent contracting, “diversity and inclusion” in hiring and so on. A recent announcement was about a government-wide crackdown on what it calls “junk fees,” which, according to the president, includes fees for extra legroom on airplanes. Very little of this is explicitly authorized by statute.
Yet, the costs keep piling up. Every regulation costs the economy in some way. The aggregate cost has reached mind-boggling levels. According to Crews, “If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s eighth-largest economy (not counting the United States itself), ranking behind France and ahead of Italy.”
Those costs are very real at the household level. Everything we buy is made more expensive by regulation. Our work is affected too, reducing our take-home pay and increasing our out-of-pocket expenses. As Crews estimates, “[A] typical American household ‘spends’ more on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, or savings.”
The new Congress needs to get this regulatory leviathan under control. It needs to use a tool called the Congressional Review Act to invalidate a bunch of these whole-of-government agenda rules. It needs to pass laws that make the process of issuing rules harder for the bureaucrats. It should give the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an explicit role of reviewing critically, like a devil’s advocate, every new rule (the current administration views OMB’s role as encouraging more regulation).
Above all, the new Congress should reconsider the principle of nondelegation and bind itself to giving less power to the president and his bureaucrats. Our pocketbooks will thank it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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One facet of the Trump agenda was to review and eliminate burdensome regulations. The removal of regulations helped to spur the economy.
It looks like Biden’s campaign “promise” (i.e. threat) includes reimposing regulations and adding new ones to further suppress the economy. As if nixing oil exploration and production didn’t already do enough economic damage.
LET’S GO BRANDON!!!!!!
See CAGW.org site for Govt waste since the 80s
CUT Waste alone & save T$$
It is getting worse, but out of control administrative law; i.e., regulations, have been a huge problem for decades. Trump began a run at the problem before Progressive (in both parties, and the media, and academia, and . . .) resistance and COVID put it on the back burner. That, with its concurrent failure on the part of the executive branch to uphold the legislated law, is the central problem of government now and will be for years to come. Regulation is the mechanism used to impose authoritarianism on us. The executive branch is at fault for not restraining itself within the bounds of the Constitution and the law, but it is really the fault of the legislative branch for sloppy legislating thereby allowing itself to become irrelevant. We are lucky that the Supreme Court is constituted the way it currently is or things would be a darn site worse.
Just what Biden and his stooges, or handlers, are doing to the economy in this country should be enough reason to vote against every democrat running for office, or reelection. They are destroying us, and what’s even worse is they don’t seem to care one bit about it. Unless we purge everyone of them they will not only destroy this country, but also bankrupt us. For the sake of this country we need to rid our government of all left wing liberal democrats, so go vote against them on the 8th.
Constitutional administrative law 101: Article 1, Section 1: All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. Therefore ALL “administrative law” aka “regulations” is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Even if the exact same legislation would be constitutional if passed by Congress, there is ZERO constitutional authority to authorize ANY body other than Congress to enact ANYTHING with the force of law.