The Dreck Equation: Charting the regulatory cosmos

Most people think of federal regulation as the 3,000 or so rules published each year in the Federal Register and archived in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). But that’s just the tip of the regulatory costberg. The administrative state stretches far beyond formal rules into other “rule equivalent” interventions and controls that escape traditional notice-and-comment procedures but still broadly shape the economy and society.

To highlight this vast hidden universe, I’ve proposed in Forbes something I call the “Dreck Equation,” a lighthearted (but still serious) riff on the famous Drake Equation in astronomy used to estimate the number of communicative alien civilizations that might exist. Just as the Drake Equation multiplied astronomical probabilities to explore the unknown, the Dreck Equation sketches a way to account for the regulatory dark matter and dark energy that pervade government activity.

The equation’s foundation is the annual rule count—about 3,000 in recent years. But layered on top are:

• Guidance documents, memos, policy statements, and other dark matter that agencies issue without engaging in notice-and-comment rulemaking;

• Contracts and procurements, which often include de facto regulatory conditions;

• Grants and subsidies, which can come with strings attached capable of influencing behavior as much as any rule.

Each of these vectors gets a weighting factor (β) to account for how much they function like actual rules (0.1 would mean 10 guidance documents are equivalent to one rule, for example). The more rule-like their effects, the higher the weight, and the bigger the Dreck Load.

Of course, we don’t yet have the data or infrastructure to calculate this load precisely–we cannot even meaningfully add notice-and-comment rules together to tabulate burden–but that’s the point. Policymakers need to recognize and measure the full scope of federal intervention, not just what shows up in the CFR.

This matters because the cumulative effect of hidden regulation can rival or exceed what’s imposed via formal rules. From broadband subsidies to pandemic policies to “Dear Colleague” letters from federal agencies to antitrust policy and public-private partnerships, Americans often comply with decrees that were never properly debated, disclosed, or approved through democratic processes.

The Dreck Equation is a call to stop ignoring these invisible rule equivalents and start holding policymakers accountable for them. As with the Drake Equation, we’ll never reach a precise number, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to chart the stars, or the compliance constellations.

For more, including the breakdown of each component of the Dreck Equation, see my latest article in Forbes, “The Dreck Equation: A Drake Equation For Mapping The Hidden Universe Of Federal Regulation.”