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
Free the Economy podcast: The future of financial regulation with Thomas Hoenig
In this week’s episode we cover the status of occupational licensing in the 50 states, the coming crack-up over entitlement spending,…
Blog
HHS cutting Head Start red tape shows the cost of regulatory micromanagement
Individual regulations are often defended as necessary on their own terms. But as CEI Senior Fellow Wayne Crews’ Ten Thousand Commandments documents, the…
Blog
It’s not the (government’s) thought that counts
Good intentions are not enough to create an effective regulation. An executive agency, Congress, or the White House can have the best intentions in…
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News Release
Report: Regulations cost $2 trillion annually, but only Congress can fix the problem
The Competitive Enterprise Institute today released its annual report documenting the vast burden that federal regulations impose on American businesses and citizens. “Government regulations continue…
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Chapter 13: Getting things undone: An agenda for rightsizing Washington
We close with an appeal to restore enumerated powers. This would solve the overregulation dilemma, and would have prevented it in the first place. Reforms…
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Chapter 7: Unified Agenda of regulatory actions
Along with the Report to Congress, the Federal Register, and the Code of Federal Regulations, another vehicle for regulatory disclosure is the spring and fall…
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Chapter 5: Over 19,000 agency public notices annually
Presidents issue a few dozen memoranda and other proclamations each year. Departments and agencies, however, issue thousands of public notices in the Federal Register every…
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Chapter 4: Regulatory dark matter
Although executive actions are typically understood to deal with the internal operations of the federal government, they increasingly can have binding effects and influence private…
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Chapter 10: Federal rules affecting state and local governments
State and local officials’ concerns about federal mandates overriding their priorities resulted in passage of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA) of 1995. The law…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Ryan Young
Senior Economist and Director of Publications
- 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