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.
Featured Posts
Blog
This week in ridiculous regulations: Animal herders and delaying REAL ID
President Biden’s final Federal Register week was a busy one. Its 4,199 pages would make for a 209,950-page year if it sustained that pace. CEI…
Blog
Free the Economy podcast: Welfare costs and benefits with Scott Winship
In this week’s episode we cover the Los Angeles wildfires, reforms to high-skilled immigration, new leadership at the Department of Energy,…
Blog
Is Congress even trying? 3,248 new rules vs. 175 laws
In 2024, federal agencies issued 3,248 rules and regulations, while Congress enacted only 175 laws. I refer to the simple ratio—19 rules for…
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Products
Liberate to Stimulate
Download Chapter 10 as PDF Policy makers frequently propose spending stimulus as a way to grow economies. It rarely goes well. A regulatory liberalization…
Products
Government Accountability Office Database on Regulations
Download Chapter 9 as a PDF The various federal reports and databases on regulations serve different purposes: The Federal Register shows the ag- gregate…
Products
Analysis of the Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations
View Full Document as PDF The Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions (Agenda) is the document where agencies outline…
News Release
Report: Trump Deregulation Proceeds, But Threatened by Trump Regulation
The Competitive Enterprise Institute issued a report today on the burden imposed by federal government regulations: Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory…
Products
Regulatory Dark Matter: Over 22,000 Public Notices Annually
Download Chapter 7 as a PDF Without actually passing a law, government can signal expectations, specify parameters for and influence various industries—including health care,…
Products
Regulatory Dark Matter: Presidential Executive Orders and Memoranda
Download Chapter 6 as a PDF Executive orders, presidential memoranda, and other executive actions make up a large component of executive “lawmaking.” They merit…
Products
Tens of Thousands of Pages and Rules in the Federal Register
Download Chapter 5 as a PDF The Federal Register is the daily repository of all proposed and final federal rules and regulations.427 Although its…
Products
What Comes after “Trillion”? The Unknowable Costs of Regulation and Intervention
Download Chapter 4 as a PDF If real debt levels on the fiscal budget and entitlements can be vastly higher than the public is…
Products
Toward a Federal “Regulatory Budge”
Download Chapter 3 as a PDF When Congress spends, no one questions that disclosure is necessary for voters to hold representatives accountable. Federal expenditure…
Products
Swamp Things – Trump’s Discordant Regulatory Impulses Threaten to Derail His Successes and Expand the Administrative State
Download Chapter 2 as a PDF President Trump has pruned rules and costs and held down regulatory output with more enthusiasm than other presidents.146 Trump…
Products
9,999 Commandments? Six Ways Rule Flows Have Been Reduced or Streamlined
Download Chapter 1 as a PDF This edition of Ten Thousand Commandments begins with a survey of approaches the Trump administration took in its…
Study
Ten Thousand Commandments 2020 – Executive Summary
Download the Executive Summary as a PDF Spending control and deficit restraint are indispensable to a nation’s stability and long-term economic health. Yet alarm…
Study
Ten Thousand Commandments 2020
Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the size, scope, and cost of federal regulations, and how they affect American consumers,…
Blog
Trump’s Executive Order on #NeverNeeded Regulations
In an op-ed in National Review, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young takes a look at President Trump’s new Executive Order directing agencies to get rid…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
President Trump issued an Executive Order encouraging agencies to keep #NeverNeeded regulations waived during the coronavirus permanently off the books. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies issued new…
Blog
Trump Signs Executive Order to Spur Economic Recovery through Deregulation
President Donald Trump on May 19 signed an executive order titled, Regulatory Relief To Support Economic Recovery. The order gives cabinet secretaries and agency heads emergency powers to suspend or even eliminate regulations…
News Release
#NeverNeeded Regulation Report: Lift Regulations that Make Energy More Expensive
Lower-income households spend more of their budget on energy costs than more affluent ones, which is why regulations that increase the cost of energy have…
News Release
New Executive Order to Stimulate Recovery by Deregulating Builds on CEI’s #NeverNeeded Campaign
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) commended President Trump’s decision today to sign a new Executive Order directing cabinet members and agency heads to immediately identify…
Study
Lift #NeverNeeded Regulations that Make Energy More Expensive
Low-income households, which are more likely to suffer from unemployment and other stresses during the COVID-19 crisis, spend much more of their household budget on…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Retail sales declined 16.4 percent in April, setting a new record low for the second month in a row. Congress returned to Washington, putting the…
Citation
#NeverNeeded Regulation Report: White House Can Speed Up COVID-19 Recovery by Cutting Regulations without Congress
In a new paper released today, CEI Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews outlines several deregulatory measures the White House could take without Congress that…
Study
Pen, Phone, and Eraser?
There have now been several layers of congressional rescue-and-stimulus response to the coronavirus crisis, and there will be more “phases” to come. Given partisan discord,…
News Release
Congress Should Work With Trump Administration to Reduce Regulatory Barriers to COVID-19 Recovery
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced a proposed fourth COVID-19 recovery package that would spend roughly $3 trillion but contains no significant regulatory relief.
Study
Narrow the Focus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may well have taken their eye off the ball by…
The Wall Street Journal
Amazon’s Pandemic Success Story
There’s one bright spot in the dismal pandemic economy. Amazon is trying something that no company has attempted before: supplying the essential needs of 325 million Americans…
Youtube
VIDEO: Iain Murray Discusses #NeverNeeded Regulations and COVID-19
Vice President for Strategy and Senior Fellow Iain Murray joins Dana Loesch to discuss #neverneeded regulations and COVID-19…
The Epoch Times
Federal, State, and Local Governments Shed Over 170 Regulations to Fight Pandemic
The Epoch Times cites CEI on #neverneeded regulations: Even more regulations can be scrapped to empower American industry to help with the crisis,…
Bloomberg Law
Covid-19 Revives Debate over Economic Benefits of Deregulation
Bloomber Law cites Vice President for Strategy and Senior Fellow Iain Murray on #neverneeded regulations: Direct government aid won’t be enough to get…
CATO
Regulation after COVID-19
The CATO Institute cites CEI on #neverneeded regulations: Many of these regulations have no sound public justification whether in or outside of an…
The Federalist
South Africa’s Coronavirus Repression Signals Worse To Come
The Federalist cites CEI on #neverneeded regulations: Think tanks and researchers are working hard to shine a light on just how destructive artificial…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The first full week of May featured a continuing pandemic, the biggest unemployment increase in U.S. history, a hailstorm in the D.C. area, freezing temperatures…
The Federalist
A Proposed 13-Point Trump Agenda For Economic Stimulus By Reforming Regulation
I remembered wondering in 2017 whether the federal government would be larger or smaller after four years of Trump. We had our answer even before the…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The 2020 Federal Register passed 25,000 pages, and is poised to surpass last year’s page count by more than 1,000 pages. The number of final…
Blog
CEI Files New Challenge to the Administration’s Fuel Economy Standards
CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman discusses the issue with Walter Kreucher, one of the petitioners in the case, Walter Kreucher, a retired automotive engineer who…
Blog
The Economy after COVID-19 Will Be Different from Before, Part One
As governors begin to lift restrictions on economic activity, polling data show that Americans are generally still afraid of the virus and have changed their…
Blog
Like the Sun Not Rising in the East?
The Federal Register, the official daily government publication of regulations, proposed rules, and similar items did not go online today. We were awaiting today’s Federal…
Blog
The Coronavirus Outbreak Highlights Importance of the Artificial Intelligence Debate
Tracing of individuals and other measures involving artificial intelligence are in the news with respect to managing individuals’ reentry into the economy in the wake…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
New unemployment applications were down to 4.4 million last week. This is still more than an order of magnitude greater than the pre-coronavirus record. With…
Blog
DEREGULATION IN AN EMERGENCY: The President’s Emergency Powers Include Not Just Imposing Regulations on Industry, but also Suspending Regulations
Across the country, governors have suspended harmful regulations on an emergency basis due to the COVID-19 crisis. The improvements that have resulted have got people…
Blog
Congress Has Already Introduced Bills to Reform #NeverNeeded Regulations
Policy makers have already waived more than 350 regulations and counting that were slowing the pandemic response and harming economic recovery. But with a 185,000-page…
Reason
Federal Regulations Are Making the Grocery Store Supply Crunch Worse
Reason cites Senior Fellow Gregory Conko on FDA food regulations: “It’s not terribly unreasonable to have these sort of minimal safety rules remain…
Washington Examiner
COVID-19 is Changing Politics in Ways Good and Bad
The Washington Examiner cites CEI’s #NeverNeeded campaign: At the same time, a great many petty regulations are being scrapped. Rules on plastic bags,…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Please do all you can to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Hopefully Congress will also act on some of the #NeverNeeded regulations that…
Blog
California’s #NeverNeeded AB5 Is Harming the Coronavirus Response
California’s AB5 law was already backfiring before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It has cost thousands of jobs—many of which are home-based. During a time of…
Blog
VIDEO: Road Map to Reopening
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hosted a fascinating video conference this week entitled “Big Picture: Road Map to Reopening,” with the Chamber’s Suzanne Clark and…
Washington Examiner
How The White House “Guidance For Regulation Of Artificial Intelligence” Invites Overregulation
Excessive top-down federal funding and governance of scientific and technology research will be increasingly incompatible with a future of lightly regulated science and…
Blog
How to Spot a #NeverNeeded Regulation
Not every regulation on the books is directly harming the COVID-19 response. There are a lot of other regulations that need reform, but the #NeverNeeded…
Inside Sources
Post-Virus Economics – Working Toward a Small Business Recovery
When the stay-at-home orders are lifted, we’ll be in a race to get millions of Americans back to work. Large companies will be in a…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
When Congress convenes next week, it will likely begin work on a Phase 4 stimulus bill. CEI analysts have made the case that addressing #NeverNeeded…
Real Clear Markets
An Effective Pandemic Response Would Be Deregulation
During a pandemic, regulations should not get between sick people and health care, or between hungry people and food. This also applies in normal times.
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