Chapter 4: The expanding Code of Federal Regulations
The page count in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)—where the Federal Register’s rules come to rest in small print in bound volumes of magenta, teal, and fuchsia—is not as dramatic as the yearly count of tens of thousands of pages in the Federal Register, but is still a sight to behold.
In 1960, the CFR contained 22,877 pages. By 1975, that count (including the CFR’s index) had surged to 71,224. As of year-end 2021 (2022 and 2023 figures have not been logged yet at the National Archives), the count stood at 188,346, as seen in Figure 14. That is a 165 percent increase in the CFR since 1975. In 2008, when George W. Bush left office, the count stood at 157,972.
The number of CFR bound volumes now stands at 243, compared with 133 in 1975. The expansion since George W. Bush, not including Biden’s recent two years, is 19 percent. (For a detailed breakdown of numbers of pages and volumes in the CFR since 1975, see Appendix F.)
The CFR archives agency rulemakings as the United States Code does for statutes. But traditional rules and regulations in the CFR are supplemented by executive actions and subregulatory guidance documents with no fixed archive since the revocation of Trump’s 2020 Executive Order 13981, “Promoting the Rule of Law through Improved Agency Guidance Documents.”