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…
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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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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
2,191 new pages were added to the 2012 Federal Register last week, for a total of 19,487 pages. At this pace, the 2012 Federal Register…
Blog
TSA Trifecta
First, a TSA manager at Dulles airport has been arrested for running a prostitution ring. Second, two Miami TSA employees were arrested for trashing a…
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Obamacare: Constitutionality Argument Misses the Point Entirely
Conservatives are ebullient over the unexpected hostility and skepticism the government's lawyers faced from the Supreme Court Justices over the three days of hearings on…
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No to Broccoli Mandate, Yes to Health Insurance Mandate?
Over at the Daily Caller, I go over some possible explanations for the different results and conclude:…
Blog
Obamacare Harms State Finances, Imposes Unfunded Mandates, Drives Up State Budget Deficits; Even Democrats Criticize Provisions
While public attention has focused on Obamacare's unconstitutional "individual mandate," challenged yesterday in oral arguments at the Supreme Court, other parts of the health…
Blog
The FCC’s Concern for Competitors, not Competition
Last week, the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on Verizon Wireless’s proposed purchase of spectrum from Cox Wireless and SpectrumCo. The spectrum…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
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Ryan Young
Senior Economist
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Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
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Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
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Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
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