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
Regulatory Reform in the 118th Congress: Separation of Powers Restoration Act
The separation of powers is a key aspect of American government. To decentralize power and ensure checks and balances, the Founders divided the federal government…
City Journal
Roll It Back
Medicaid, the federal-state entitlement for the poor, now provides health insurance to more than one in four Americans. Enrollments surged after the Affordable Care Act…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
An Executive Order from the Biden administration made some of the biggest system-level regulatory changes in years. It raises the threshold for “economically significant”…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a short work week due to the Fourth of July holiday, but agencies still managed to issue new rules covering everything from stormwater…
Forbes
Here’s How Financial And Other Regulators Are Issuing Rules Without Writing Them
At the end of June I testified in a U.S. Senate Homeland Security Regulatory oversight subcommittee hearing on Examining the Use of Agency Regulatory…
Blog
Testimony on Regulatory Budgeting before the House Budget Committee
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee conducted a hearing on An Introduction to Regulatory Budgeting, and I was invited to testify by Chairman…
Blog
My One Agreement with Sen. Warren: Federal Rulemaking Should Be Transparent
In my two previous posts, I picked apart Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s allegation that notice and comment rulemakings are unfairly tilted in the favor of regulated…
Blog
More Wrongheadedness from Sen. Warren on Notice and Comment Rulemakings
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, federal agencies are required to undertake certain procedures when they promulgate rules of general applicability.
Blog
Sen. Warren’s Baseless Criticism of Notice and Comment Rulemaking
In a recent blog post about “regulatory capture,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren claimed that notice and comment rulemaking is unduly biased towards regulated parties.
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Clyde Wayne Crews
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Fred L. Smith, Jr.
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