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Pondering the Paradox of the Paltry Proliferation of Prominent Proposed Rules in the Federal Register
Spending is up, the debt is up, and Republicans keep helping raise the debt ceiling. Armageddon does not result, we have learned. On the…
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Threats to Democracy Posed by an Unleashed Administrative State
President Joe Biden’s much-covered Independence Hall remarks last week have drawn their share of praise, condemnation, and memes. Prominent was Biden’s easy deployment of…
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Megaportals for Guidance Documents: Toward Emergency 2025 Legislation to Correct Biden’s “Whole-of-Government” Incursions
In preparing an August 2022 update on executive branch sub-regulatory guidance documents and memoranda (the observable tally is 107,000 but vastly more exist), a…
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Federal Agency Guidance Document Inventory Tops 107,000 Entries
Federal statutes appear in the U.S. Code. Regulations, pass through the Federal Register, and come to rest in the Code of Federal Regulations. But no…
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How the Inflation Reduction Act Will Expand Regulation
Ever since observers began tallying rule counts and pages in the Federal Register, detractors have complained about what poor measures such devices are. They might…
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Stomping FROGs: An Updated Inventory of Biden’s Elimination of Trump-Era Final Rules on Guidance Document Procedures
Since President Obama unleashed the pen and phone, federal agency guidance documents and the confusion and abuse surrounding them has been covered extensively.
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294 Costliest Rules in Biden’s Spring 2022 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations
Unelected federal agencies personnel issue over 3,000 rules and regulations every year. That compares to a far lower number of laws passed…
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A Breakdown of Rules in the White House’s Spring 2022 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions
Since the early 1980s, federal departments and agencies have highlighted selected regulatory priorities in spring and fall editions of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory…
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Act Now! The Bipartisan Innovation Act Is a Reminder of the Urgent Need for a Bold National Elevator Plan
President Biden on numerous occasions of late has complained about the miracle that one can simply drive to a McDonald’s in rural areas and…
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A Brief Outline of a Regulatory Report Card Congress Should Enact
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so. — Quote frequently attributed to Galileo, that, alas, probably was not…
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How Biden’s “Building a Better America” Agenda Consolidates Permanent Federal Power
Biden’s “Building a Better America” is not about building America, but rather about spending to fatten an already overfed central government with a…
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The DHS “Disinformation Governance Board” Needs to Be Dismantled
In recent months, an escalation of various forms of federal surveillance has become apparent. That’s bad enough, but the trend is rendered more problematic…
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Biden’s Escalating Fusion of Regulation and Censorship Requires Decisive Pushback
President Joe Biden’s “whole of government” advancement of numerous elements of an-interventionist “Building a Better America” agenda is accompanied by an alarming level…
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Escalation of Surveillance Threatens Right to Anonymity
The Biden administration has pressured big tech social media platforms to advance its policies in areas like cultural debates, climate interventions, and to stifle dissent…
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Addressing Forever Crises
It does not suffice for this administration to attribute record 8.5 percent inflation to “Putin’s price hike.” We have endured not just…
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An Emergency Law to Extinguish Regulatory Dark Matter
Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. …. Nothing will ever return to…
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Getting Things Undone: Lessons from the Obliteration of Trump’s One-In, Two-Out Campaign
‘Tis the season. As midterms approach, we’re seeing “agendas” emerge from aspirational conservatives nominally opposed to Biden’s transformation of the United States. These anti-progressive inventories…
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Edward Scissorhands and Federal Regulatory Disclosure
Recently, President Joe Biden proclaimed before the Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting on March 21 that there’s “going to be new world order”…
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Biden’s Whole-of-Government Equity Agenda Precludes Limited Government
A 1977 Reason magazine review of Friedrich Hayek’s “Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Vol. 2) noted Hayek’s contention “that the prime public concern should be,…
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Biden’s Repudiation of Trump’s Regulatory Streamlining Agenda: An Inventory
The explicit pro-regulatory shift by the Biden White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has entailed abandonment not merely of Trump’s…
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One Nation, Ungovernable? The Bipolar Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations
As we lurch from crisis to crisis, it is interesting to compare the way one administration’s philosophy of government response to both shock and normalcy…
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Biden’s State of the Union “Trillions Down” on Big Government Mistakes
Ladies and Gentlemen, the State of the Union is that of far more government control over the nation’s economy in years. The years following 2022…
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Joe Biden and Merrick Garland Promise New Regulation in Agriculture and other Sectors
After stepping off into the snow upon arrival Monday, January 3, President Joe Biden headed back to the White House, where his first action of…
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Biden’s Fall 2021 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulation Heralds Abandonment of Regulatory Oversight Role
The Biden administration has just released the Fall 2021 edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.
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An Inaccurate Update on OMB’s Inaccurately Reported Costs of Federal Regulation
Here inside the Beltway we are now in fiscal year 2022. In anticipation of the next edition of the chronically late “annual” Report to Congress…
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How to Prepare for Administrative State Reform While Stuck in a Progressive Ditch
Would-be regulatory reformers find themselves in a ditch during the Biden administration, which regards Trump deregulatory efforts as “harmful” and overturned reform-related executive orders…
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Federal Agency “Significant” Rulemakings Return to Bush-Obama Heights
While agencies are on track to issue about the same number of rules as they did last year, the number of “significant” rules among…
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The Radicalism of “Build Back Better” Is the Crisis that Classical Liberals Must Not Let Go to Waste
If the mantra of the day is, “Never let crisis go to waste,” then what are we to do when artificial crisis is being created…
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Why Government Infrastructure Spending Crowds Out Private Investment and Innovation
Those proclaiming of the Senate infrastructure bill that none of the spending is needed are correct. In embracing this gigantic spending bill, Republicans have helped preclude the…
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Enshrining Cronyism
If you like your cronyism, you can keep it. For that matter, if you like your income inequality, you can keep that too. Highly reminiscent…
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Biden’s Spring 2021 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulation, by the Numbers
The Biden administration released the Spring 2021 edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions today. The purpose…
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Stimulating the COVID Recovery without Trillions in Spending
Over at Inside Sources, I make the case that deregulation, freer trade, and continued vaccinations will do more to open up the economy than…
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Why Republicans Should Abandon the Infrastructure Compromise with the White House
The GOP should go nowhere near any trillion-dollar infrastructure deal with the White House. Reasons include the already enacted stratospheric COVID spending that couldn’t…
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Biden’s $6 Trillion Budget Should Warn Republicans to Drop Infrastructure Compromise
The release of the Biden $6 trillion, biggest-ever and latest-in-a-century fiscal year 2022 budget proposal is a good time to reflect upon…
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The Endless Frontier Act to Boost Science and Tech Can Mean Endless Regulation
Related to regulatory effects of mass spending on national plans and the deadweight costs of spending, are the distortions, diversion of resources, and…
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EPA Follows Through on Biden Directive to Hide Guidance Documents from the Public
Before President Joe Biden signed an executive order called Revocation of Certain Executive Orders Concerning Federal Regulation that, among much else, instructed federal agencies…
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Universal Basic Income and the Custodial Administrative State
The American Families Plan (EFP), touted both before and during President Biden’s address to Congress, is still a work in progress, with…
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Runaway Spending and Regulation Call for an Abuse-of-Crisis Prevention Act
The escalation of spending and regulation in the face of economic shock—by means of “resets,” “New New Deals,” “new social contracts,” and “Build…
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Federal Agencies Begin Process of Removing Guidance Document Portals
By the end of the Trump administration, several dozen federal agencies had issued final rules clarifying their use of sub-regulatory guidance documents. In one of…
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In Blow to Disclosure, Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations Database Removes “Deregulatory” Designation
In a setback to transparency alongside Joe Biden’s program to eliminate the disclosure of guidance documents via portals on agency websites, the Unified…
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Leveraging the Congressional Review Act to Shield Rather than Discipline Regulation
While the Congressional Review Act (CRA) was strongly bipartisan when it passed in 1996, supported by then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and others…
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Why Biden Cannot Simply Revoke Trump’s Executive Order 13891 Requiring the Discipline of Guidance Documents
President Joe Biden’s progressive agenda shapers have prepped dozens of executive orders for him to autograph during his first few days in office. Prominent among…
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A Look at “Modernizing Regulatory Review”
The Biden “Modernizing Regulatory Review” plan is about gutting the restraint of the past four years, and if you read statements from the proponents of…
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The Danger in Blurring the Private and Public Boundaries with Government Regulation
The recent decisions of many technology companies to remove users and customers from their platforms have deeply divided Americans. Many Americans feel censored and discriminated…
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Trump’s 2020 Unified Agenda on Regulation: An Update on One-in, Two-out
As just explored at Forbes, the Trump administration in early December released the fall 2020 edition of the twice-yearly …
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White House’s 261 Big Rules in the Pipeline Herald More Regulation than Deregulation
No matter the presidential administration, federal agencies issue thousands of rules and regulations every year, compared to a relative handful of laws passed by Congress.
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Executive Order 13,891 Sub-Regulatory Guidance Document Portal Tops 70,000 Entries
Congress makes laws. Agencies make rules, but they also issue guidance documents in heretofore unknown quantity. The year 2019 brought Executive Order 13891 (“Promoting the…
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America’s “Unconstitutional Slop” Predates Trump’s Executive Actions on Pandemic Economic Relief
The logic of the administrative state dictates the expansion of itself in response to any crisis. Executive actions play a game rigged against limited government.
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When Spending Is Regulation: The Grand Unification Theory of Government Growth
Alongside helplessness in the face of a looming $27 trillion debt, debating administrative state policy hasn’t been much help in forestalling federal government growth.
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An Executive Order 13,891 Guidance Document Portal Update: Another Lap to Go
President Donald Trump’s October 9, 2019 Executive Order 13,891 (E.O. 13,891) and a subsequent White House Office of Management directive to amplify and clarify it…
