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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Regulatory Reform in the 118th Congress: Separation of Powers Restoration Act
The separation of powers is a key aspect of American government. To decentralize power and ensure checks and balances, the Founders divided the federal government…
City Journal
Roll It Back
Medicaid, the federal-state entitlement for the poor, now provides health insurance to more than one in four Americans. Enrollments surged after the Affordable Care Act…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
An Executive Order from the Biden administration made some of the biggest system-level regulatory changes in years. It raises the threshold for “economically significant”…
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Daily Caller
The Towering Federal Register
This week marks the publication of the 20th anniversary edition of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the federal regulatory state, Ten Thousand Commandments.
Publication
Ten Thousand Commandments 2013: A Fact Sheet
Full Document Available in PDF 1. This is the 20th anniversary of Ten Thousand Commandments. In that time, 81,883 final rules have…
Blog
Udall-Paul Legislation Spreads Freedom for Credit Unions and Entrepreneurs
By definition, if a bill is sponsored by Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., or any similarly odd ideological couples in the House, it…
Blog
Regulation of the Day 231: Serving Olive Oil
Starting January 1, 2014, any olive oil served at EU restaurants “must be in pre-packaged, factory bottles with a tamper-proof dispensing nozzle and labelling in…
Blog
10KC in WSJ
The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighed in this morning on the issue of regulation, citing a few numbers from the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition…
Blog
CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
This week in the world of regulation: Last week, 71 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 64 new final…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
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Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform
Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
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Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
- Antitrust
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Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
- Climate
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- Energy and Environment