The Dreck Equation: A Drake Equation For Mapping The Hidden Universe Of Federal Regulation

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Joe Biden’s 2024 regulatory big bang—106,109 Federal Register pages—shattered cosmic records. But the 3,000 notice-and-comment rules chronicled there every year and archived in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) comprise a fragment of the regulatory universe. The notice-and comment rulemaking so many emphasize as “regulation” is light years from encompassing the full sweep of federal intervention in the economy, business and households.

To the observable final rules total one must add “rule equivalents” stemming from other corners of the legislative and administrative state galaxy. These include:

  • Guidance documents, policy statements, memoranda and other forms of what we may call “regulatory dark matter”;
  • The economic and social distortions of hundreds of billions in grants and subsidies as well as the strings attached to them;
  • Rule-like conditions accompanying hundreds of billions more in contracts, procurements and acquisitions in the domestic, foreign and war economies;
  • Pass-through grants-in-aid to states;
  • Non-rule interventions such as antitrust, federal R&D steering and fusions of business and government including the replacement of competitive enterprise with public private partnerships (PPPs);
  • Finally, looming on the event horizon is the potential for regulatory “dark energy” enabled by the Internet of Things, foreshadowed in recent legislation.

I have a fondness for astronomy and for astronomical analogies regarding the unknowable, and federal interventions beyond fiscal outlays, debt and conventional regulation fit the bill. The Drake Equation, created in 1961 by astronomer Frake Drake, is a way researchers guesstimate how many alien civilizations might be chatting out there in the Milky Way. Drake’s approach was multiplying the likelihoods of key junctures in the progression of extra-solar planets potentially harboring life capable of communications. Carl Sagan on the classic television series Cosmos explained Frank Drake’s equation to estimate “N”—the number of talkative alien civilizations—by multiplying the following terms:

  • N*: Number of stars in the Milky Way (100 billion)
  • Fp: Fraction of stars with planets (around 50 percent)
  • Ne: Average number in a given solar system habitable or ecologically suited for life (maybe 0.01 for one percent chance)
  • Fl: Fraction of suitable planets where life actually arises (similar or less likelihood than Ne)
  • Fi: Fraction of planets with life where intelligence emerges (also very low)
  • Fc: Fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop detectable electromagnetic communications (ditto)
  • fL: Fraction of a planet’s lifetime graced by technical civilization (hundreds or thousands of years before destruction or self-immolation; take your pick)

Probabilities decrease the further to the right, but multiplying terms gives one a rough guess of who’s out there yakking it up. Tiny changes in assumptions yield a universe teeming with life, or a humanity cold and alone. Sagan sketched out an optimistic take of millions of civilizations in the Milky Way—and a pessimistic yet still thrilling guess of 10.

Dreck Invasion: A Drake Equation For Detecting Alien Rule Equivalents in the Administrative Universe

Official measurements of regulation and burdens of intervention are rare and sketchy – more astrology than astrophysics in the best of circumstances. Even rules themselves were not counted until 1976, when they stood at a whopping 7,401. Whether in terms of effect, scope, or (most significantly) dollar costs, we simply do not possess particularly useful additive units of regulation the way we can reckon dollars of federal spending. Counting numbers of rules, as we do here like everyone else, is crude since rules’ effects are all different.

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