Ten Thousand Commandments 2026 is out now

Today is release day for this year’s edition of Wayne Crews’ Ten Thousand Commandments. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of CEI’s first publishing the report. For those not familiar, Ten Thousand Commandments provides a big-picture view of federal regulation.

The federal government releases a detailed spending budget each year, but it has no equivalent for regulation. While people can easily look up how much Washington spends on defense or health care, it is extremely difficult to look up how many regulations exist, how much they cost, or which agencies are most active.

Ten Thousand Commandments fills that gap by compiling regulatory data from scattered government sources and putting them in one place.

This is useful information, which is why Bloomberg, Issues & Insights, and the Washington Times have all reported on it this morning.

The main story from this year’s report is that while the Trump administration is issuing fewer formal regulations than previous administrations, it is still just as interventionist, if not more so.

The Trump administration’s informal regulating includes pressure tactics such as jawboning against law firms, universities, and media companies; litigation or threatening litigation; tying strings to government funding or threatening to withdraw funding; and offering exemptions to tariffs and other interventions in exchange for political support or other favors. The government now holds ownership stakes in private businesses such as Intel and MP Materials, and President Trump has used a golden share of stock to override U.S. Steel’s management decisions.

With that in mind, here are some headline numbers from this year’s Ten Thousand Commandments on formal regulations:

• US households pay on average $15,859 annually in a hidden regulatory tax, which consumes 15 percent of income and 20 percent of household expenses.
• Federal regulation’s total compliance costs and economic effects are at least $2.153 trillion annually, and certainly far higher. 
• If US regulation were a country, it would be the world’s 11^th-largest economy, ranking behind the Russian Federation and ahead of South Korea. 
• The 10.5 billion hours Washington says it took to complete federal paperwork according to the 2023 Information Collection Budget translate to the equivalent of 14,983 human lifetimes.

For more information on the size and scope of federal regulations, and for ideas on how to reform them, read the 2026 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments here.