There are two main areas in which Congress can enact meaningful reform. The first is to rein in regulatory guidance documents, which we refer to as “regulatory dark matter,” whereby agencies regulate through Federal Register notices, guidance documents, and other means outside standard rulemaking procedure. The second is to enact a series of reforms to increase agency transparency and accountability of all regulation and guidance. These include annual regulatory report cards for rulemaking agencies and regulatory cost estimates from the Office of Management and Budget for more than just a small subset of rules.
In 2019, President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at stopping the practice of agencies using guidance documents to effectively implement policy without going through the legally required notice and comment process.
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Congress should heed GAO’s new regulatory reform recommendations
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a December 2023 report titled “Options for Enhancing Congressional Oversight of Rulemaking and Establishing an Office of Legal…
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News Release
Report: Federal Regulatory Agencies Abuse Power with Guidance Documents
A new report by Competitive Enterprise Institute and Paragon Health Institute scholar Dr. Joel Zinberg, Restoring Good Guidance Practices: How to restrain the administrative…
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Study
Restoring Good Guidance Practices
Executive summary Federal agency guidance documents form a large and expanding part of the administrative state’s regulatory universe. These informal documents including memoranda, bulletins, and…
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Blog
Regulatory Reform Bills in the 118th Congress: The Article I Regulatory Budget Act
The federal government is supposed to put out an annual budget to track its spending. Why doesn’t it do the same thing for regulation? The…
Forbes
Regulation Without Representation: A Quick Revisit Of The “Unconstitutionality Index”
Administrative agencies rather than the elected Congress do the bulk of U.S. lawmaking despite the strictures of Article I of the Constitution —…
Blog
Regulatory Reform Bills in the 118th Congress: The GOOD Act
Regulatory dark matter is a serious problem. Agencies are supposed to run new regulations through a formal process which includes publishing a draft version of…
Blog
Regulatory Reform Bills in the 118th Congress: The REINS Act
Every new session of Congress is a new chance to enact substantive regulatory reform. This post inaugurates an occasional series highlighting reform bills that have…
Washington Examiner
Democrats and Republicans: Unite around abundance
Inflation may finally be starting to wane, but there is no clear end in sight to the economic turmoil that Americans have experienced for nearly…
Americans for Tax Reform
Q&A on Credit Card Regulation
Americans for Tax Reform has been consistently opposed to government regulation of debit and credit card transactions. Last year, ATR opposed the Credit Card Competition…
Staff & Scholars
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Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
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Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform
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Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
- Automobiles and Roads
- Aviation
- Business and Government
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Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
- Antitrust
- Automobiles and Roads
- Banking and Finance
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Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
- Climate
- Energy
- Energy and Environment