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
The Dreck Equation: Charting the regulatory cosmos
Most people think of federal regulation as the 3,000 or so rules published each year in the Federal Register and archived in the Code of…

Blog
The week in regulations: Deep seabed mining and recreational gulf gag
A massive flood in Texas killed at least 120 people. President Trump announced new 50 percent copper tariffs which will take effect on August 1.

Blog
The logbook of federal red tape last year came to…
The Federal Register for 2024 closed out Joe Biden’s final year in office with a record 106,109 pages. This count swamps the previous record of…
Search Posts
Op-Eds
New Agenda Fails to Address Problems
George Bernard Shaw once observed that: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the…
Op-Eds
Red & Green: Is the President Cutting Enough Environmental Fat?
If you believe the rhetoric from environmental activists about the Bush-administration budget, you would think that the world would come to an end if…
News Release
Bush Budget Missteps On Energy, Environment, Regulatory Reform
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Contact for Interviews: Christine Hall, 202.331.2258, or Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273…
News Release
CEI Scholars Respond to Bush Budget
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> OVERVIEW Analysis from CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde…
News Release
Free Market Reaction to the State of the Union
Contact: Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 Washington, D.C., February 2, 2005—President Bush’s State of the Union address tonight will expound his vision of an “Ownership Society,” in…
Study
The Viability of Municipal Wi-Fi Networks
Full Document Available in PDF Ownership of broadband networks by municipalities,…
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