Blog
How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 6: Enhance Disclosure in ‘Unified Agenda’
There are rules, and then there are rules. Agencies are supposed to alert the public to their priorities in the semi-annual “Regulatory Plan and Unified…
Blog
How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 5: Scrutinize Informal ‘Guidance’ Documents
When a new president scrutinizes agency rules as we have called for in this series, he or she also needs to bring “guidance documents” under…
Blog
How A New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 4: Expand Number of Rules Receiving Cost Analysis
The Office of Management and Budget conducts review of some significant or major rules’ cost-benefit analyses, but not quite as many or as deeply as…
Blog
How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 3: Review, Revise, Repeal, and Sunset
Short of the moratorium advocated at the top of this series, and in keeping with the spirit of executive orders and retrospective reviews that agencies…
Blog
How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 2: Boost Resources and Free Market Staff
If we must take the central, top-down administrative state as a given—and it seems that for the time being the Constitution is not coming to…
Blog
How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 1: Freeze Regulations Temporarily
In today’s economy, talk about regulatory liberalization has become a bit more bipartisan.
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 6)
By shedding light on comparative agency activity, budgeting and simultaneous improved congressional oversight could counter agency overreach.
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 5)
Benefits, even more so than costs do not lend themselves to measurement by a third party or external observer, and abuse will result from the…
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 4)
This week I began by making the case for the idea of a regulatory cost budget but wanted to spend time exploring looming pitfalls and…
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 3)
Monday in this space, I advocated the idea of a regulatory cost budget but noted there exist looming pitfalls and political traps that could derail…
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 2)
I advocate the idea of a regulatory cost budget but note that there exists looming pitfalls and political traps that could derail it or easily…
Blog
Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 1)
Our case for capping and “budgeting” regulatory costs across federal agencies opens by asserting that that, perhaps apart from certain raw compliance and paperwork burdens,…
Blog
Can a New President Cut Regulations Unilaterally?
Both presidential candidates have delivered economic speeches over the past two weeks, and both have at least given a nod to red tape and the…
Blog
Next Administration Will Have to Try Harder on Regulatory Moratorium
In a speech yesterday to the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump proposed a moratorium on new federal regulations.
Blog
Federal Register Tops 50,000 Pages, Yet Obama’s Report to Congress Is MIA
The annual Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities is quite overdue.
Blog
Washington Post “Fact Checker” Column Still in Denial over Regulatory Costs
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” column is running its critiques of the Republican convention, and in the process is trying again to rebuff a $15,000…
Blog
House Judiciary Subcommittee Assesses OMB Review of Federal Regulations
Last week on July 6, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Sub-Committee Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law conducted a hearing on…
Blog
Testimony on Regulatory Budgeting before the House Budget Committee
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee conducted a hearing on An Introduction to Regulatory Budgeting, and I was invited to testify by Chairman…
Blog
Examining Agency (Over)Use of Regulatory Guidance Documents
Today the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management conducted a hearing on "Examining the Use of Agency…
Blog
Wireless Net Neutrality: You Were Warned
Hundreds of people have been burrowing into this week’s D.C. District Court of Appeals 2-1 decision giving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) everything it wanted…
Blog
New Options for Regulatory Reform from Speaker Ryan
We here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute appreciate the release of the new report by the Task Force on Reducing Regulatory Burdens, issued as part…
Blog
Controlling Federal Agency Guidance Documents: A To-Do List for Congress and Reformers
When I wrote about the proliferation of federal agency guidance documents and other regulatory “dark matter” that skirts Congressional oversight and even normal…
Blog
Federal Regulations Affecting Small Business
It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch, something particularly true for the small businessperson. The “Small Business…
Blog
Regulation: A 28 Percent Hidden Tax For The Family
When corporations pay taxes, you pay taxes. That is, while it’s popular to tax rich corporations, and even if they write the check to the…
Blog
Regulatory Cost Blowout: Burden Is Triple the Deficit, Greater than Personal and Corporate Income Taxes Combined
The last time the federal government balanced the budget was between 1998 and 2001. But those were days when a $2 trillion federal budget…
Blog
The Barack Obama Regulatory State Towers over that of Bush
A glance at the overall count of rules and regulations leads one to suppose regulatory burdens are decreasing. After all, since Obama took office the…
Blog
The Proliferation of Federal Agency Guidance Documents
Recently we looked at some prominent recent examples of federal agency guidance—costly to-dos for the private sector. Today I wanted to say just a…
Blog
When Bureaus Attack: Recent Examples of Federal Regulation by “Guidance Document”
In the recent paper “Why Congress Must End Regulation by Guidance Document,” I described the rise of federal agency regulatory dark matter and…
Blog
Federal Agency “Guidance Document” Disclosure Gaps Show Congress Is in the Dark on Regulatory Overreach
In “A Quick and Dirty Inventory of Federal Agencies' Significant Guidance Documents,” I provided, well, a quick and dirty table depicting “significant” (usually, not always,…
Blog
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…