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…
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…
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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Time to End Big Sugar’s Sweet Deal
Sugar is already shaping up to be a contentious issue in upcoming debates on the 2007 omnibus farm bill. The call for dismantling…
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Accountability, Power, and Our CAP Project
Violations of the Constitution come in all shapes and sizes. Many of you may be familiar with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which CEI…
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Animal Rights, Human Wrongs
Animal rights extremists—whom the FBI has labeled America’s biggest domestic terrorism threat—have encountered a number of serious reverses recently. These reverses are a great victory…
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CEI Planet: March – April 2006
Full Document Available in PDF New Era, or ‘Ancien Régime,’…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. LEGAL State attorneys general ask the Supreme Court to step into a dispute over the states’ 1998…
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Corporate McSocial Responsibility
Fast-food gadfly Eric Schlosser has a new book out. Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food is Fast…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform
Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
- Automobiles and Roads
- Aviation
- Business and Government
Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
- Antitrust
- Automobiles and Roads
- Banking and Finance
Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
- Climate
- Energy
- Energy and Environment