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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Washington Examiner
Easy Come, Easy Go
The Federal Reserve announced Oct. 29 that it was ending quantitative easing, its program to keep interest rates low. Two days later and halfway around…
Blog
Washington’s Thanksgiving Turkeys: Here Are All of the White House’s 200 Economically Significant Rules
As usual, the president will pardon a turkey again this year for Thanksgiving; For us turkey eaters, though, our federal holiday treat is lots and lots…
News Release
Thanksgiving Regulation Report: 3,415 Rules & Regs
Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the federal government dropped its Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, which is supposed to shed some light…
Blog
The Federal Register Topped 70,000 Pages Today
The Federal Register, where federal agencies’ daily rules, regulations, notices, “guidance,” bulletins and other material accumulate each day, just topped 70,000 pages for 2014. 70,052…
Blog
CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a bit of a slow week as these things go, but regulators still published new rules on everything from stress testing to sage…
Forbes
Big Sexy Holiday Fun With The 2014 Unified Agenda Of Federal Regulations
The fall Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions always seems to appear just before the Holidays. You know, when nobody’s really looking. The…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
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Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
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Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
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Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
- Climate
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- Energy and Environment