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“THE TEN THOUSAND COMMANDMENTS” AND THE COST OF NORMATIVE INFLATION
Blog
Biden’s yearly Federal Register second-highest page count ever, could still score number one
The Federal Register is the daily depository of rules and regulations. Today, the count stood at 86,256 pages, with three weeks to go for…
Blog
Federal government waves goodbye to ‘economically significant’ regulations
Last week, the Fall 2023 edition of the White House’s Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions appeared. It features…
Forbes
Biden Releases Fall 2023 Unified Agenda Of Federal Regulations
Since the early 1980s, federal departments and agencies have highlighted rulemaking priorities (not a complete inventory) in the (mostly) twice-yearly …
News Release
Biden’s Unified Agenda report on regulations has two main problems
On December 6, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at last released its regulatory blueprint for the coming year, the…
American Radio Journal
Wayne Crews with Ten Thousand Commandments
CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews joins the American Radio Journal to discuss Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.
Sound Cloud
Wayne Crews Are Federal Regulations Costing Taxpayers And Companies Almost $2 Trillion Per Year
The Lars Larson Show is joined by CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews on November 30th, 2023.
The Daily Signal
EXCLUSIVE: Here’s How Much Regulations Cost Average American Family—and How Biden Is Making It Worse
“American households pay at least $14,000 in hidden regulatory costs every year,” Wayne Crews, the Fred L. Smith fellow in regulatory studies at the…
Washington Times
Biden’s battle on climate and social programs escalates red tape
Rules on everything from new safety measures for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic to new standards for grades of canned baked beans…
News Release
Report: Federal regulatory burden undermines economy, financial security
A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute tallies the huge and growing cost federal regulations impose on American businesses and families –…
Products
Chapter 5: Page Counts and Numbers of Rules in the Federal Register
The Federal Register is the daily repository of all proposed and final federal rules and regulations. Although its number of pages is often cited as…
Products
Chapter 3: Getting Beyond a Federal Regulatory Budget and the Limitations of Administrative Reform
Federal programs are funded either by taxes or by borrowing, with interest, from future tax collections. When Congress spends, no one questions that disclosure…
Products
Chapter 6: The Expanding Code of Federal Regulations
The page count in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), where the Register’s rules come to rest in small print, is not as dramatic…
Products
Chapter 9: A Note on Rule Reviews at OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Tracking the effects of rules and regulations, executive orders, memoranda, and regulatory guidance is vital. These alternative regulatory actions have become powerful means of working…
Products
Chapter 13: Federal Regulations Affecting State and Local Governments
Ten Thousand Commandments primarily emphasizes federal regulations imposed on the private sector. However, state and local officials’ complaints over federal mandates’ overriding their own…
Products
Chapter 10: Analysis of “The Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions”
“The Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions” (the Unified Agenda) is the document in which agencies have outlined regulatory priorities…
Products
Chapter 8: Another Dimension of Regulatory Dark Matter: Over 22,000 Agency Public Notices Annually
Along with presidential proclamations are those of departments and agencies. These are numerous and sweeping. Through various kinds of guidance documents, notices, and policy statements,…
Products
Chapter 15: Regulation without Representation: The “Unconstitutionality Index”—13 Rules for Every Law
Administrative agencies, not Congress, do most U.S. lawmaking, despite Article I of the Constitution stipulating otherwise. Congress is to blame here, as it routinely enacts…
Products
Chapter 4: The Unknowable Costs of Regulation and Intervention and a $1.939 Trillion Estimate
The federal government undertakes little review of federal regulation to ensure that regulations individually do more good than bad each year, and it performs no…
Products
Executive Summary – Ten Thousand Commandments 2023
The cost of government extends well beyond what Washington taxes. Federal regulations add another $1.939 trillion to Americans’ annual burden. Federal environmental, safety and health,…
Products
Chapter 2: Competition Policy That Exiles Competitive Enterprise Harms Equity
Biden has repeatedly claimed, “I’m a capitalist.” He also rightly says that capitalism without competition is “exploitation.” However the top-down vision Biden promotes, which is…
Products
Chapter 11: Notable Rules and Rulemakings by Agency
In recent Unified Agenda editions and in other venues, federal agencies have noted the regulatory initiatives listed below, among many others pending or recently completed.
Products
Chapter 14: Government Accountability Office Database on Regulations
The federal government’s reports and databases on regulations serve different purposes: The Federal Register details and depicts the aggregate number of proposed and final rules—both…
Products
Chapter 16: Liberate to Stimulate: Framing an Agenda for Rightsizing Washington
It should be hard to enact bad law and regulation, not to get rid of them. A whole-of-government spending and regulatory agenda like the one…
Products
Chapter 12: Federal Regulations Affecting Small Business
Given discrepancies seen in the final rule counts, the overall counts of both small business rules and significant small business rules could also be understated.
Study
Ten Thousand Commandments 2023
View Full Report Here Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the size, scope, and cost of federal regulations,…
Products
Chapter 7: The Presidential Dimension of Regulatory Dark Matter: Executive Orders and Memoranda
Executive orders, presidential memoranda, presidential directives, ersatz fact sheets of recent administrations, and other executive proclamations make up a substantial component of what has replaced…
Blog
Slice the regulatory turkey this Thanksgiving
The turkeys Liberty and Bell just received a Thanksgiving pardon from Joe Biden. The official presentation of a turkey for a presidential pardon…
Blog
Vehicle kill switches and other horrible things Washington is doing to us from a distance
The remote kill switch for automobiles authorized by the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021 is a…
Blog
White House report reveals tens of billions in new annual regulatory costs
A consolidated Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations hit the shelves at the end of October,…
News Release
CEI supports Rep. Foxx’s amendment to halt OMB’s A-4 rewrite
The House of Representatives will soon consider an amendment from Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) to the 2024 Financial Services and General Government spending…
Forbes
Congress Must Halt The Ascendance Of Regulation By Subsidy
Excessive regulation is one of those perennial Washington issues, which makes sense given that Washington pops out new rules like chocolate bunnies. A …
News Release
Biden executive order on artificial intelligence will be a problem: CEI analysis
President Biden is reportedly poised to sign an executive order aimed at monitoring artificial intelligence technology and moving toward new regulations for AI. CEI experts…
Forbes
Net Neutrality Resurfaces To Join The Bidenomics Regulatory Costberg
“It was always about government control.” —Commissioner Brendan Carr, Federal Communications Commission Open Meeting, October 2023 Just in time for Halloween,…
Citation
Red tape burden surges to 10.34 billion hours, 15,000 lifetimes
In his new report on red tape, Clyde Wayne Crews, the regulatory expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the bulk…
Blog
Biden admin wants to sweep independent agency regulation costs under the rug. Congress should say no.
When Congress gets around to streamlining federal regulations and forcing disclosure of their costs, exposés of the paperwork inflicted on the economy by…
Forbes
A New Shot At Enlisting The Office Of Management And Budget In Regulatory Streamlining
Congressional leadership on regulatory streamlining is more urgent than ever in the wake of a post-Covid legislative flurry and attendant regulatory pressures soon to…
Real Clear Markets
Barbie, Hot Wheels, and the Market for Lemons
The Barbie movie is more than a bit of good fun. It also teaches an economics lesson about lemons—the old slang term for defective goods, not…
Blog
Net neutrality is political predation
It’s fitting that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chose to dig up the net neutrality corpse just before Halloween. Now, our elected representatives need…
News Release
FCC move to reinstate heavy-handed Net Neutrality regulations risks health of telecommunications infrastructure
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Jessica Rosenworcel announced her intention to re-instate so-called Net Neutrality rules that were repealed in 2018. The FCC issued…
Forbes
Federal Paperwork Hours Consume The Equivalent Of 14,883 Human Lifetimes Annually
The White House Office of Management and Budget has this year issued catch-up editions of Information Collection Budget of the United States Government, a task…
Blog
What’s wrong with Bidenomics?
Yesterday, I pointed out that in the looming threat of a government shutdown, President Joe Biden is aiming to cement as his legacy something…
Blog
Congress can say no to Bidenomics in shutdown showdown
The contentious fiscal year 2024 budget battle, which might result in a partial federal government shutdown, is unfurling precisely as the national debt…
Forbes
Regulatory Reforms Belong In The FY2024 Budget Deal
Certain regulatory reforms with deep bipartisan endorsement should be incorporated into contentious fiscal budget agreements, particularly when spending cuts are difficult (which is always).
Blog
Under Biden, thousands of government guidance documents are becoming much harder to find
Laws passed by Congress get cataloged in the U.S. Code, while rules and regulations that incubate in the daily Federal Register land in…
Forbes
Once-Promising Guidance Document Disclosures Are Stagnating Under Biden: Inventory and Observations
Laws passed by Congress are archived by subject matter in the U.S. Code. The rules and regulations that incubate in the…
Blog
Why Congress needs to care about Biden’s ‘Circular A-4’ subterfuge
Proposed changes in the American government’s executive regulatory functions showcase a conflict of visions over separation of powers; over executive overreach; over the size…
Washington Examiner
Resistance grows to Biden hiding costly, choking regulations
Washington Examiner cites Clyde Wayne Crews on costly regulations: Two proposed changes have been singled out by groups including the Competitive Enterprise Institute…
Forbes
Congress Should Confront Significant Rules And Regulations Obscured By “Bidenomics”
This past week, the number of rules and regulations in the 2023 Federal Register crossed the 2,000 mark. At 59,438 pages today, the tally will top…
Blog
‘Economically significant’ regulations: an obituary
I never thought I’d miss “economically significant” rules and regulations. But Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14094 (“Modernizing Regulatory Review”) has redefined “Significant regulatory…
Forbes
Beware: The Biden Administration Refers To “Economically Significant” Regulations In The Past Tense
The past few days have brought renewed attention to Biden’s Executive Order 14,094 on…
Washington Examiner
Industry groups fear new Biden regulatory changes could hobble growth
Washington Examiner cites CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews economic growth hindrance: Even under the current $100 million threshold, the Biden administration has released…
Blog
Inflation Reduction Act turns one, and wow that’s an ugly baby
As President Joe Biden celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (here’s the White House “Fact Sheet“)…
Wall Street Journal
Regulators Gone Wild
Wall Street Journal cites CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews on overabundance of regulation: According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews, the Biden Administration…
Blog
Don’t regulate AI. Defund it.
Just yesterday, Smart Home speakers were infuriating us with their confused and stubborn responses to simple questions. These days, the ascent of something closer…
Blog
GOOD Act only first step in forcing federal agencies to come clean on guidance documents
Alongside the familiar profusion of notice-and-comment regulations, federal agency guidance can include memoranda, notices, bulletins, directives, news releases, letters; even blog posts and…
Forbes
Careful: Misbegotten Government-Business “Blueprints” Can Lobotomize Artificial Intelligence
Atop numerous directives and another of Washington’s periodic “Bill of Rights” proclamations misconstruing who is protected from what by such…
Forbes
Biden’s Competition Council Targets Free Enterprise, Expands Government
Joe Biden’s Competition Council, created by his executive order dubbed “Promoting Competition In the American Economy,” celebrated its second anniversary and convened its …
Letters
Letter of Support on the Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act and the POST IT Act
News Release
House Oversight and Accountability Committee unanimously advances regulatory reform legislation
Earlier today, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee advanced 41 to 0 the Guidance Out of Darkness (GOOD) Act from Rep. James Comer…
Letters
Letter of Support on H.R. 890 and H.R. 3230
Blog
Bidenomics? Here are the 297 costliest rules in the president’s Spring 2023 Unified Agenda
Federal agencies issue thousands of rules, regulations and guidance documents every year compared to the relative handful of laws enacted by…
Comment
OMB’s Problematic Circular A-4 Rewrite
OUTLINE Discard the pro-regulatory bias of the federal government Restore regulatory streamlining prior to Circular A-4 rewrite Restore the $100 million threshold for…
Forbes
Biden’s Top-Down Economy, Powered By Executive Action
Joe Biden didn’t take a Juneteenth break, instead heading to Palo Alto to tout “historic action to combat the climate…
Blog
Is Biden admin disappearing a red flag for costly regulations?
Is the Biden administration trying to do away with the category of “economically significant” regulations altogether? Before this administration, an “economically significant” regulation…
News Release
House passes sensible regulatory reform bills to shrink power of the administrative state
Earlier today, the House passed 220 to 211 the Separation of Powers Restoration Act (SOPRA) sponsored by Rep. Scott Fitzgerald…
Blog
New Biden White House Agenda shows 3,666 rules in regulatory pipeline
The Spring 2023 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions has been released. A fall version of this twice-yearly document will also contain…
Blog
Time to shine more light on regulators’ ‘shadow boxes’
Accompanying presidential executive orders and memoranda are the numerous sub-regulatory proclamations of departments and agencies we like to call “regulatory dark matter.” Occasionally…
Blog
Rising small business regs may spur Senate to pass REINS Act
In a bid to restore congressional accountability over the regulatory enterprise, the 118th Congress this week is set to vote on the so-called REINS…
Blog
Biden administration keeps making it harder to track government ‘guidance’ documents
Federal government “guidance documents” consist of agency memoranda, bulletins, circulars, administrative interpretations, letters, manuals, and so much more. These are not supposed to be…
Blog
Congress should stop the White House from rewriting ‘Circular A-4’
Barring an extension, next week (June 6) is the deadline for comments on the White House Office of Management and…
Blog
Do more deregulation in debt limit deal
The internal GOP debate this week is over lower-case “d” default if a June 6 deadline for an increase in the debt…
Blog
Let’s get this huge ‘hidden tax’ of regulation out into the open
Smack dab in the middle of contentious debt limit negotiations, the House Budget Committee held another in its series of hearings on American economic…
Forbes
Congress Should Halt OMB’s Rewrite Of Circular A-4 Guidance On Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis
People love to gripe about red tape; but not only is there a method to the madness, there’s a certain madness to the method…
Issues & Insights
Biden Unleashes The Regulatory Kraken — And There’s No Land In Sight
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews put it recently, “President Biden is leading an unprecedented expansion of the administrative…
Forbes
A Congressional Regulatory Report Card Can Begin to Address Biden’s New Attempts to Downplay Regulatory Costs
The Federal Register website, portals like Regulations.gov and other online databases make it far easier than in pre-Internet times to acquire information on the assortment of…
Reason
Despite SCOTUS Ruling Limiting Its Authority, EPA Tries To Unilaterally Regulate Carbon Emissions Again
CEI’s Daren Bakst and Wayne Crews are cited in Reason about the EPA trying to regulate carbon emissions despite SCOTUS rule: “Biden’s…
Forbes
Congress Must Mobilize To Halt Biden’s Radical Administrative State Transformation
[T]he genius of the Progressives in the late 19th century was to preempt or push large sectors of the emerging future (the…
News Release
Biden EO on ‘Environmental Justice’ Poses Threat to all Americans
The Biden administration today announced a new executive order purporting to “further embed environmental justice into the work of federal agencies.” CEI regulatory…
Blog
Congress shouldn’t party like it’s 2019 on national debt
Now comes the GOP’s turn to do its own version of a “lockdown.” Republicans should heed the advice of a member of the other party,…
News Release
House Republicans Helpfully Tie Government Reforms to Debit Limit Deal
House Republican leadership yesterday released the text of their debt limit deal which trades a suspension or increase in the debt limit for a…
News Release
Biden’s ‘Modernizing Regulatory Review’ Executive Order Will Undermine Review
President Biden yesterday issued an “Executive Order on Modernizing Regulatory Review,” by which “modernizing” apparently means undermining transparency and disclosure and pushing a…
Blog
Debt Limit: When You Run Out of Other People’s Money, Keep Spending Anyway
Spending and deficit control are indispensable to a the long-term economic health and stability of a nation. But today, fiscal restraint is visible only…
Forbes
Regulatory Reform’s Role In Addressing The Debt Limit
Spring is here, the first quarter is over, and the federal debt limit is back in play. Again. The cap was last …
Washington Examiner
Sen. Mike Braun cuts path to slow Biden’s ‘noxious’ agenda
It drew applause from deregulation advocates. “Sen. Braun’s efforts to strike Biden’s regulatory excesses are vital,” said Clyde Wayne Crews…
Forbes
The “Guidance Out Of Darkness Act” Is The Low-Hanging Fruit Of Regulatory Reform
We often marvel that we don’t actually know how many federal agencies exist. And the number of “commissions” and programs (many…
News Release
Senator Ron Johnson and 15 GOP Colleagues Introduce Guidance Out of Darkness Act in 118th Congress
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) introduced the Guidance Out of Darkness (GOOD) Act this week, a bill aimed at bringing transparency to agency guidance…
Forbes
Laws Against Laws: A 118th Congress Regulatory Reform Agenda For Rightsizing Washington
It’s all right to be little-bitty. — Alan Jackson, “Little Bitty,” Everything I Love, 1996 It ought to be harder to enact…
News Release
Congress Shouldn’t Compound Silicon Valley Bank Collapse with Bailouts and Bad Ideas
The Silicon Valley Bank collapse has spurred some terrible policymaking ideas in Congress, exacerbating bad decisions by the bank that has led to its…
News Release
Biden Budget Amounts to Top-Down Central Planning, Lacks Needed Reforms
President Biden today unveiled his latest budget submitted to Congress. CEI experts take a dim view of the agenda of excess spending and…
Forbes
Biden’s 2024 Federal Budget Proposal Extends Helicopter Government
It appears that instead of a federal fiscal budget that sticks to the basics, we are growing accustomed to an ambitious central government that…
Forbes
Regulation Without Representation: A Quick Revisit Of The “Unconstitutionality Index”
Administrative agencies rather than the elected Congress do the bulk of U.S. lawmaking despite the strictures of Article I of the…
Wall Street Journal
Biden’s Regulatory Deluge
Regulatory costs to the economy are now reckoned to be at least $2 trillion, or roughly 8% of U.S. gross…
Forbes
A Case For The Article I Regulatory Budget Act
There is a case to be made for officially “budgeting” and capping costs of the thousands of rules and regulations that federal agencies set…
Washington Examiner
Republicans can use the debt ceiling fight to better prepare Americans for the next economic crisis
On the outside chance that House Republicans are able to wrangle President Joe Biden into cutting federal spending to set a new…
Blog
Biden’s State of the Union in Five Words: More Spending, Regulation, and Dependency
Ladies and gentlemen, we can sum up President Joe Biden’s the State of the Union (SOTU) in five words: More spending, regulation, and dependency.
Blog
Right Sizing the Federal Trade Commission Is Step One
As part of regulatory streamlining and administrative state reform efforts, members of the 118th Congress have already reintroduced several prominent pieces of legislation. These…
Blog
Inventories of Federal Agency Major Rules and Regulations Poised to Rise
Federal government reports and databases on regulations serve different purposes: The Federal Register details anddepicts the aggregate number of proposed and final rules—both those…
Blog
Agency Notices in the Federal Register Merit Close Monitoring by Congress
Along with presidential proclamations like executive orders and memoranda (examined recently here) are those of departments and agencies, which are numerous and sweeping.
Blog
An Update on Biden Administration Executive Orders and Presidential Memoranda
Executive orders, presidential memoranda, “Fact Sheets,” and other executive proclamations make up a substantial component of what passes for lawmaking in the United States…