Biden’s 2024 Federal Register page count already second highest ever

We’ve not closed the Book of Regulation for 2024, Biden’s final calendar year in office, but we can mark a milestone nonetheless.

The Federal Register is the daily depository of rules and regulations, and the latest 606-page edition carries Biden’s regulatory state over a certain threshold.

Today is the Veterans Day holiday, but the released-in-advance Tuesday, November 12 Federal Register brings the 2024 total page count to 89,476 pages. This is the second-highest yearly count of all time, with over a month and a half to go.

While the rule count itself (2,709 so far) is nowhere near an all-time high at this juncture, the Register is one of our few indicators of regulatory intensity nonetheless. The costs imposed by the rules of 2024 are among the highest on record.

Below appears a simple chart with the top-20 page counts, highlighting Biden’s new landmark. He’s got a month and a half to top Barack Obama’s record-setting 95,894 pages.

Biden’s Register wrapped up calendar year 2023 with 89,368 pages, now freshly relegated to the third-highest tally.

Having spurned Trump’s regulatory streamlining priority as harmful, and instructing agencies to instead advance progressive aims through whole-of-government regulatory initiatives in climate, equity, and other economic and social engineering policies, Biden has posted big jumps over his 79,856 2022 tally, which now stands as only the eighth-highest count.

Why is Donald Trump listed at number four, one might wonder? It’s been detailed, but despite Trump’s streamlining emphasis, Federal Register optics can suffer from removing rules “one-in, two-out”-style as from writing new ones. One might call that a bug of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act’s public notice-and-comment mechanism. But Trump was an anomaly, and a thicker Federal Register will generally mean what you think it means.

Therefore, when the Trump formalizes his promised one-in, ten-out campaign for rules in 2025, we could see the Register flex again. (Re)incorporating Trump’s “Deregulatory” rule designation that Biden eliminated and featuring it in the Federal Register would help make appropriate distinctions, as would other breakdowns of regulatory information. The federal government controls all resources it could possibly need to provide better regulatory report card metrics.