Ten Thousand Commandments

The 2015 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments is out now. The report gives a 30,000-foot view of the federal regulatory state: how many new regulations come out each year (3,500+), how much they cost ($1.88 trillion annually), and other important information, along with a menu of reform ideas.

This kind of big-picture information is readily available for the federal budget, but not the regulatory state. 10KC is an effort to make the government’s most opaque branch a little more transparent.

You can read the whole report here. If you prefer a shorter version, the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial summarizing the study’s main findings, as did Investor’s Business Daily and the Washington Times. Wayne Crews and I also have an op-ed in today’s Fresno Bee:

And although members of Congress like to blame agencies for these costs, lawmakers share part of the blame… While Congress passed 224 laws last year, agencies issued 16 times more new regulations – 3,554 new rules in total. This huge disparity between laws passed and regulations issued by unelected agency officials can be described as an "unconstitutionality index," which averaged 26 regulations issued for every law passed over the last decade.