The Open Market Blog

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/20/2020

After another busy week for agencies, the 2020 Federal Register is on pace to be 79,121 pages. None of those pages include the Spring 2020…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/16/2020

There are lots of good regulatory reform ideas out there. The ideas with the most staying power share a common theme. They don’t just treat…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/13/2020

New COVID cases continued to rise, and the Supreme Court handed down a number of controversial decisions to end its term. Regulatory agencies issued new…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/09/2020

Regulatory reform is one of the most important policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Removing obstacles to health care can save lives. Removing barriers against…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/08/2020

Trade barriers are an obvious #NeverNeeded candidate for removal during a pandemic and a recession. They make medical supplies scarcer and more expensive. They raise…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/06/2020

The USMCA trade agreement came into effect on July 1, and three states increased their minimum wages. The unemployment rate went down to 11.1 percent.

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/01/2020

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) comes into effect today. USMCA’s policy changes are modest, and its economic impact will be small. But it sets a…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/29/2020

Consumer spending rose 8.2 percent in May, a new record that gives hope for a quicker economic recovery. On the other hand, new coronavirus cases…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/26/2020

The John Locke Foundation has released a Rebound Plan for North Carolina, where it is based—the basketball reference is a nice touch. It contains reform…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/23/2020

President Trump’s steel tariffs were intended to boost U.S. manufacturing. They backfired to the point where a group of steel-using industries sued to stop the…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/22/2020

Trade protectionists have taken to calling free traders soft on China. According to John Bolton’s forthcoming book, it turns out to be the other way…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/18/2020

Pierre Lemieux, in Regulation magazine, draws from the new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments to estimate the Trump administration's net impact on regulation. Trump’s…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/15/2020

The rate of new coronavirus cases increased last week, adding a note of caution to tentative efforts at reopening. Regulatory agencies issued new final regulations…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/08/2020

Friday’s 13.3 percent unemployment rate announcement was actually good news, and says much about the more than 600 regulations waived so far at various levels…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/04/2020

At Inside Sources, Wayne Crews and Ryan Young have an op-ed summarizing the main findings of Wayne’s new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, plus…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/03/2020

Many regulations have proven especially harmful during the COVID-19 crisis. But many of those waivers are temporary. Those temporary waivers should be made permanent. One…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/01/2020

CEI released the 2020 edition of Wayne Crews’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report, which gives a big-picture view of the federal regulatory state. Regulatory agencies…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/27/2020

The 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments is out. Wayne Crews’s annual report gives a big picture view of the federal regulatory state. There has…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/26/2020

In an op-ed in National Review, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young takes a look at President Trump’s new Executive Order directing agencies to get rid…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/26/2020

President Trump issued an Executive Order encouraging agencies to keep #NeverNeeded regulations waived during the coronavirus permanently off the books. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies issued new…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/18/2020

Retail sales declined 16.4 percent in April, setting a new record low for the second month in a row. Congress returned to Washington, putting the…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/11/2020

The first full week of May featured a continuing pandemic, the biggest unemployment increase in U.S. history, a hailstorm in the D.C. area, freezing temperatures…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/04/2020

The 2020 Federal Register passed 25,000 pages, and is poised to surpass last year’s page count by more than 1,000 pages. The number of final…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/27/2020

New unemployment applications were down to 4.4 million last week. This is still more than an order of magnitude greater than the pre-coronavirus record. With…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/24/2020

President Trump has deferred selected tariff payments for companies experiencing coronavirus-related hardship. It came after more than two weeks of starts, stops, denials, and reversals.

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/23/2020

Policy makers have already waived more than 350 regulations and counting that were slowing the pandemic response and harming economic recovery. But with a 185,000-page…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/20/2020

Please do all you can to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Hopefully Congress will also act on some of the #NeverNeeded regulations that…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/16/2020

California’s AB5 law was already backfiring before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It has cost thousands of jobs—many of which are home-based. During a time of…

Labor and Employment

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/13/2020

When Congress convenes next week, it will likely begin work on a Phase 4 stimulus bill. CEI analysts have made the case that addressing #NeverNeeded…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/09/2020

In a new op-ed in RealClearMarkets, Iain Murray and Ryan Young outline the major points of CEI’s just-released #NeverNeeded paper, which identifies regulations harmful to…

Consumer Well-Being

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/06/2020

Quarantine and stay-at-home orders will likely last through the end of April in many places. In more heartening news, governments are rolling back numerous #NeverNeeded…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/01/2020

In a new Washington Examiner op ed, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young proposes a Regulatory Reduction Commission to act as a permanent watchdog to prevent #NeverNeeded…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/30/2020

Coronavirus deaths topped 1,000 in the U.S. last week, while new cases continued to double every few days. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/23/2020

Governments are responding to the coronavirus with a getting rid of harmful regulations on restaurants, schools, and stores. Most of these rules were never needed…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/16/2020

It was a rough week. Coronavirus infections and deaths continued to climb. Wall Street is officially in a bear market, and Congress and President Trump…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/09/2020

Coronavirus continued to spread, the Democratic presidential field significantly narrowed, and the former head of the UAW was charged with embezzlement. Meanwhile, agencies issued new…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/02/2020

The coronavirus outbreak began to infect financial markets as well as people, with stock markets having their worst week since at least 2008. The number…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/27/2020

By far the most common criticism of minimum wages is that they cost jobs.

Labor and Employment

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/24/2020

During the four-day week, Lawrence Tesler passed away. The underappreciated inventor created the cut, copy, and paste functions on computers. The Hair Club for Men…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/18/2020

Spring Training began for all 30 Major League Baseball teams, bringing joy across the nation. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging from grains ounce…

Regulatory Reform