The Federal Regulatory State Is Out of Control. Here’s One Way Congress Can Get Power Back

Reason.com discusses the Regulations from Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act with Ryan Young. 

There were more than 90,000 pages added the Federal Register, that behemoth of a book that annually tracks the growth of the federal leviathan, during 2016, making last year’s list of federal rules and regulations a full 10,000 pages longer than the previous record.

Including last year’s record-breaker, 13 of the 15 longest registers in American history have been authored by the past two presidential administrations (Barack Obama owns seven of the top eight, with George W. Bush filling in most of the rest), according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market D.C. think tank that diligently tracks the pages of the registry each year.

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“Congress has been all too happy to delegate away those powers to executive branch agencies,” says Ryan Young, a fellow at CEI. “Suppose a regulation passes that is unpopular or backfires or is burdensome, then congressmen, who do have to face re-election every couple of years, can say ‘don’t blame me, blame the EPA or the FCC’ or whichever agency is responsible.”

Last year, for example, Congress passed 211 bills while federal regulatory agencies approved 3,852 regulations, Young says.

To stop Congress from passing the buck like that, Young says federal lawmakers should pass something called the REINS Act—the “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act.

Read the full article at Reason.com.