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
An executive order to make freedom mandatory
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) new “Streamlining the Review of Regulatory Actions” memorandum signals a potentially transformative shift in Washington’s…
Blog
Free the Economy podcast: Charting tariff madness with Joey Politano
In this week’s episode we talk about changes in consumer credit, disappearing fast-food jobs in California, and six things the climate movement…
Forbes
Regulation Renovation: The Executive Order To Make Deregulation Permanent
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s new Streamlining the Review of Regulatory Actions memorandum signals a preferential stance toward deregulation, urging…
Search Posts
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