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A Quick and Dirty Inventory of Federal Agencies’ Significant Guidance Documents
Much is written by many on federal agency regulations’ expansion and costs. Beyond those, guidance documents, memoranda, notices, and other regulatory dark matter…
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Obama’s 7 Years of Regulation Easily Outstrip Bush’s 8
Annually, despite ups and downs, the number of federal rules and regulations tops 3,400. While the overall rule counts in the Federal Register and…
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Common Property, Gains from Trade—and Statehood
Historian Staughton Lynd argued that the contemporaneously drafted Constitution and Northwest Ordinance of 1787 were themselves components of a larger implicit package that harmonized the…
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Oversight Hearing Will Find Federal Regulatory Transparency Quite Opaque
The 2015 edition of White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) annual Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations was latest we’ve seen…
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Barack Obama as FCC Chairman
The saga of executive branch overreach continues, and we got a twofer today. The House Judiciary Task Force on Executive Overreach held a hearing this…
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The One Year Anniversary of Net Neutrality
In the pen and phone era, one of the many examples of the descent into arbitrary lawmaking influencing an entire sector of the economy is…
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Presidential Candidates Neglect Regulatory Bureaucracy
Allowing a $19 trillion federal debt when it was obvious that interest rates couldn’t remain zero forever is Exhibit A that legislatures rarely control spending.
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The 2016 Unconstitutionality Index: 39 Federal Rules for Every Law Congress Passes
The New Year brought news of yet more executive action by President Obama, most prominently this time on tweaking the Second Amendment and access to…
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Bureaucracy Unbound: 2015 Is Another Record Year For The Federal Register
With one day to go in 2015, the Federal Register tops off at 81,611 pages. That’s higher than last year at 77,687 pages and higher than it’s…
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Washington Says Merry Christmas With 80,000 Pages Of Regulation
There may be a federal war on coal in the ground, but Washington has plenty of coal for your Christmas stocking. The Federal Register—where federal…
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Obama Cements Status as King of Regulatory Bloat
Today marks a milestone for the one brandishing the Mighty Pen and Phone. The Federal Register hit 78,648 pages today. The Register is where the federal…
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Washington’s Thanksgiving Turkeys: Here’s Your Chance to Fill Up on the White House’s 218 Economically Significant Rules
The president will pardon a couple turkeys again this year for Thanksgiving. The birds will take a carbon-intensive cross country flight from San Francisco International…
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Less than 1 Percent of Federal Regulations Get Cost-Benefit Analysis
The Obama administration likes to assert that all the rules and regulations pouring out of Washington have positive net-benefits. Billions of dollars in postulated net…
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Net Neutrality Questions FCC Commissioners Need to Answer
In a House Energy & Commerce Committee oversight hearing on Tuesday, November 17, all five Federal Communications Commissioners will testify. Net neutrality, the FCC’s broad push…
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Don’t Spare the ROD: An Inventory of Resolutions of Disapproval under the Congressional Review Act
Before Thanksgiving Day, both chambers of Congress are likely to consider so-called “Resolutions of Disapproval” to attempt to reject major, cripplingly expensive Environmental Protection Agency regulations…
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Agency Overload: Meet the Federal Bureaucracy One-Page Word Cloud
There exist various counts of agencies in the federal bureaucracy, but no particular tally is regarded authoritative. The “Agency List” page maintained at FederalRegister.gov probably…
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You Won’t Believe All the Ways Federal Agencies Issue Rules
Recently, I’d pointed out that we don’t really know how many federal agencies there are. That implies we don’t know how many rules and regulations…
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Nobody Knows How Many Federal Agencies Exist
As bureaucracy sprawls, nobody can say with complete authority exactly how many federal agencies exist. The twice-annual Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions, which…
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Regulations Endanger Democracy
The House has passed some key regulatory reform measures this year, including the REINS Act most recently (which stands for “Regulations from the Executive In Need…
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Obama’s 2015 Report to Congress on Federal Regulations Is MIA
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Sunsetting Federal Regulations
An average of around 70 rules and regulations are issued every week. There were 3,554 in 2015, and have been 1,693 in 2015 as of…
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Independence Day? Yeah, Right: A Fourth of July Roundup of Federal Regulation
Congress is in recess and can’t do any more damage as the Fourth of July approaches, but federal agencies remain in business until they enjoy…
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One Nation, Ungovernable? Confronting the Modern Regulatory State
(Note: What follows is a hyperlinked version of the introductory paragraphs to the chapter of the same name in the new Fraser Institute/Mercatus…
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How Many Significant Regulations Escape Congress’ Notice?
The Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions was released in late May, presenting recently completed actions and ongoing priorities of the federal…
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Obama Has Issued More “Economically Significant” Rules in 6.5 Years than Bush Did in Eight
It happens to be the case that, in terms of overall counts of rules and regulations published in the Federal Register as final rules, the George W.
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Here Are All 205 “Economically Significant” Rules in the Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations
The Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions was released by the Obama administration just before Memorial Day weekend. It’s less of a…
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Ten Thousand Commandments 2015: A Fact Sheet
Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the size, scope and cost of federal regulations, and how they affect American…
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Comcast-Time Warner Cable Merger Derailed
Today we’ve learned again that bureaucrats and their enormous kingdoms come before consumer welfare. The collapse of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger merely because of the interference of government,…
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Balanced Budgets and Regulatory Budgets
The Joint House-Senate Conference Meeting on the federal budget has begun. Chairman Tom Price of Georgia remarked: Completing a budget is one of…
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California Drought 2.0, or Is it 3.0?
California’s water woes are back in the headlines after Gov. Jerry Brown commanded a 25 percent cut in consumption last week after extended drought. Pricing matters…