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”…
Search Posts
Blog
Barone is Right: Appeasing Protectionists Is a Bad Idea
President Obama is finally sending three pending trade agreements — with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama — to Congress for a vote. The three trade…
Blog
Poll: 14 Percent Approval Rating for Congress
Lawmakers need to do something about their do-something bias and try a deregulatory stimulus. Besides stimulating the economy, it would likely stimulate approval ratings, too.
News Release
Congress Should Start Quantifying Federal Regulation
Washington, D.C., October 4, 2011—Lawmakers in the nation’s capital seem to be desperate to secure a big fix for the broken American economy. But as…
Study
The Other National Debt Crisis
Runaway federal regulation represents the biggest threat to our economy today. To address the problem, lawmakers first need to define it and quantify its costs.
Op-Eds
Clean Air’s Dirty Residue
A lot has been made of recent court filings in which the Environmental Protection Agency suggested that it needed 230,000 more bureaucrats to regulate…
Op-Eds
Time Out for Federal Regulation
At the moment, the Federal Register stands at 61,247 pages–for 2011 alone. You can see the Code of Federal Regulations from space. Assuming this perturbs…
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