Inside the Beltway: Obama’s Unprecedented ‘Surge’ of Regulations

The Washington Times covers 10,000 Commandments by Wayne Crews.

Big government was not quite good enough, perhaps. As a kind of grand finale, President Barack Obama championed gargantuan government during his last year in office, according to a significant new study by Wayne Crews, a meticulous analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He’s tracked all the pesky federal regulations and the cost of implementing them in a new report appropriately titled “Ten Thousand Commandments.” This year’s installment arrives Wednesday and is described as a “whopper.”

The analysis reveals that during his final year in office, Mr. Obama imposed “a significant regulatory surge” that resulted in a mammoth Federal Register, the master guide to federal regs. The thing boasts 95,894 pages, is 19 percent larger than in 2015, and is the longest in the history of the register itself.

“This jump in major regulations has set a benchmark by which the Trump administration will be compared. Trump has promised to slam the brakes on overregulation,” Mr. Crews notes.

“The burden of federal regulations cost American consumers, businesses and the economy an estimated $1.963 trillion in 2016. If the cost of federal regulations were a country, it would be the 7th largest in the world, behind India and ahead of Italy,” reports Mr. Crews, who calls for more transparency, a better review process and more cost-benefit analyses for new and current federal regulations.

“In 2016, Washington bureaucrats issued 18 regulations for every one law Congress enacted. Washington must be held accountable for the burden they impose on Americans and the economy,” Mr. Crews says.

See for yourself. The report goes live online at 5 a.m. EDT Wednesday here.

Read the full article at The Washington Times.