The total cost of federal red tape last year was…

$2.15 trillion is CEI’s latest estimate of the costs of all federal regulations. It is an intentionally conservative estimate. Think of it as a floor, not a ceiling.

Unlike federal spending, regulatory costs are much harder to measure, and the bureaucracy has given little help on this front. The federal government issues no annual regulatory budget. Agencies often downplay or deny that their regulations impose financial burdens.

This estimate seeks to measure the compliance costs and takes a stab at some of the opportunity costs that federal agencies are offloading to the private sector.

The last time the Office of Management and Budget provided its own accounting – back in 2001! – it estimated the regulatory burden to be about $954 billion. That would be more than $1.64 trillion in 2024 dollars.

Of course, more regulations have been added in the intervening almost 25 years. Sweeping policy changes such as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Dodd-Frank Act, and the Affordable Care Act have added to the weight of regulation. These and more recent Biden-era initiatives contributed substantially to the $2.15 trillion tally.

The estimate is updated every year in Ten Thousand Commandments to bring some minimal transparency to the federal government’s regulatory churn. This transparency is especially important given Washington’s refusal to assess its nigh unto Bigfoot-sized footprint on the American economy.

Note: This has been the first installment of a regular series called the Ten Thousand Commandments Index. In the larger report, CEI’s Wayne Crews chronicles the growth and shape of federal regulations for the previous year. This is a monumental task, and many journalists and policy experts duly pore through it when it is released. This series is about making 10KC, as we call it in the office, a little less monumental and a little more digestible by focusing on one or two numbers at a time and using those numbers to tell a story. We hope you enjoy it.