Ten Thousand Commandments 2025 is out now

The 2025 edition of CEI’s flagship report, Ten Thousand Commandments, is out today. For more than 30 years, my colleague Wayne Crews has been tracking how many regulations agencies issue, how much they cost, and how much the total is. Think of it as the regulatory version of the government’s annual spending budget. But since the government isn’t putting all that disparate information in one place, Wayne is doing it for them.

Among this year’s headline findings:

• Federal regulations cost the average household more than $16,000 per year.
• Their total cost is more than $2 trillion.
• If it were a country, US regulation would be the world’s 8th-largest economy, ranking behind the Russian Federation and ahead of Canada.
• Regulations cost 10.5 billion paperwork-hours in 2023, equivalent to nearly 15,000 human lifetimes.

Wayne pairs that information disclosure with reforms ideas. These include:

• Disclosure requirements for “regulatory dark matter.” These are guidance documents, memoranda, and other documents that agencies use to issue regulations without going through the proper rulemaking process.
• Annual agency report cards disclosing how much their current and upcoming regulations cost.
• Congressional votes on new major regulations.
• An annual regulatory cleanup commission to comb through the 188,000-page Code of Federal Regulations for obsolete, redundant, or harmful rules to eliminate.

Read the 2025 Ten Thousand Commandments report here.