What happened to never-needed regulations

CEI led a never-needed campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was simple: if a regulation was causing harm in good times, it was probably also causing harm during the pandemic. Such rules were never needed in the first place. The right thing to do is to get rid of them.

Legislators across the country agreed with us and lifted more than 800 regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. But that was five years ago. What has happened to them? My colleague John Berlau and I give an update in the new issue to the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine:

Other never-needed rules lifted during the pandemic included some medical paperwork requirements, service area restrictions for ambulances, environmental permits, working hour limits for truckers, and more.

Many of those rules followed a similar pattern. They were waived using emergency procedures and reappeared once the emergency ended. Patients, consumers, and businesses benefited from the lighter regulatory touch, but they were made to suffer again from useless red tape as the regulatory relief was jerked away from them.

The lesson here is don’t take shortcuts. Finish the job. Tying rules to temporary emergency declarations does not give permanent relief. That requires congressional legislation, and agencies running repeals through the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment process.

John and I conclude with an institutions-matter message:

It is important for governments to learn the right lessons from the Covid response so that people will be able to more effectively respond to the next crisis, whatever it may be. The lessons from the Covid never-needed experience apply on a smaller scale every time there is a hurricane or other natural disaster. Instead of waiving the Jones Act whenever a hurricane hits Puerto Rico, Congress should repeal it altogether.

The pandemic was the worst crisis of the century so far. Even if the next major crisis is still decades away, officials have no way of knowing that. The time to prepare is now. Purging never-needed regulations and safeguarding against future buildups of regulatory sludge are key parts of that effort.

Read the whole thing here.