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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Op-Eds
Taxing Fat, Killing Jobs
Dark clouds of uncertainty now hover over the future of some 26,000 European companies and their 2.6 million employees. These firms represent Europe’s food…
Op-Eds
France Launches Global Culture War
Cultural creativity is big business in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />America. According to the most recent data from Economists Incorporated, U.S.
Op-Eds
Corporate PR Must Reach People as Consumers and Citizens
PR pros have long sought to link their efforts to clients’ return on investment. The planned campaign for the Aluminum Association, detailed in this magazine…
Op-Eds
The Green Machine
Click on pdf link above to obtain full version of article Twenty EU member and accession states labour under a cadre…
Op-Eds
Russian Revolution
On <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />December 2, 2003, Andrei Illarionov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief economic adviser, stunned green activists…
Op-Eds
Resentment, fear drive U.N. quest for control
There’s mounting evidence that the Internet’s good old days as a global cyberzone of freedom—where governments generally take a "hands off" approach—may be numbered.
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