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

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…

News Release
CEI Launches “Eye on FTC” Campaign to Raise Awareness of Agency Overreach and Lack of Transparency
WASHINGTON—The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) launched a new “Eye on FTC” educational campaign today to raise awareness about overreach and a lack of…
Search Posts
Op-Eds
Tyranny of the Unelected Regulators
Congress passed and the president signed into law 241 bills in 1998. Meanwhile, federal agencies were far busier: They issued 4,899 rules and regulations — 315…
Washington Times
Unchecked Regulatory Creep
Washington Times
Feeding the Green Money Tree
The Clinton-Gore administration continues to thumb it nose at the Constitution by trying to implement a global warming treaty (the Kyoto Protocol) that has not…
Citation
Regulatory ‘Right to Know’
News Release
June 22: Cost of Government Day
“Every year on April 15, million of taxpayers across the country file their 1040 forms, and are outraged at how much they have to send…
News Release
Institute Applauds Supreme Court Decision UpHolding First Amendmen Rights of Advertisers
Washington, DC, June 15, 1999 – The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) applauds yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Greater New Orleans Broadcasting Association v. United…
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