Time For A Regulatory Budget
The Hill cited CEI on the burden of federal regulations.
America’s regulatory burden has thrived in solitude because it’s uncounted, and therefore uncontrolled.The first step to addressing it is to begin counting. America needs a federal regulatory budget.
According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which valiantly tries to quantify the officially uncounted, federal regulations cost the U.S. $1.9 trillion in 2016. That staggering figure equals half 2016’s federal spending ($3.853 trillion) and almost 60 percent of federal revenues ($3.268 trillion).
The regulatory burden has grown tremendously. Unable to count long-past costs, we count pages: In 1936, The Federal Register had 2,620 pages; in 2016, it had 95,894. Ominously, that nearly 40-fold increase will likely continue — without official counting.