Ten Thousand Commandments 2026
Introduction
Record federal spending and record-setting regulatory burdens often march in lockstep. New spending is straightforward to track, but regulations obliging the private sector to shoulder compliance costs are a different story. These off-budget mandates expand despite Congress’s occasional attempts to check them. And the Biden-era hunger for top-down control on energy, climate, family leave, and child care has not disappeared with the return of Donald J. Trump, but shifted.
Just as consumers shoulder much of the corporate income tax and tariff burden, regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs, and lower output. Off-budget regulatory costs can drag down the economy, just as overspending can.
That overspending is significant. The Congressional Budget Office’s 2026 Budget and Economic Outlook, covering fiscal year (FY) 2025 with projections for FY 2026 to FY 2036, depicts discretionary, entitlement, and interest spending of $7.01 trillion in FY 2025. Spending is projected to top $7.45 trillion in 2026 and exceed $10 trillion in 2033. The deficit stood at $1.775 trillion in 2025 and is expected to top $2 trillion again in 2028 and remain well above that level. Total national debt now exceeds $38 trillion, up from almost $20 trillion when Donald Trump first assumed office in 2017. Interest payments alone are projected to exceed $1 trillion for the foreseeable future.
Regulations lack such precise quantification but should set off similar alarms. When the administrative state began its march over a century ago, few imagined the tangle of hundreds of thousands of rules, guidance documents and other sub-regulatory forays it would produce and preserve. In recent years, even modest liberalizations during the first Trump administration were reversed by Joe Biden, who changed the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) mission away from oversight and toward the active promotion of regulatory initiatives. The stronger second Trump administration agenda remains similarly vulnerable if Congress does not codify certain elements of it or advance alternative streamlining reforms.
Prior editions of Ten Thousand Commandments detailed Trump’s streamlining effort (2021) and Biden’s reversals and implementation of ambitious whole-of-government spending and regulatory initiatives spanning climate, equity, economic, and social matters, an agenda capped with an appetite for censorship and surveillance. This 2026 edition covers the successes and shortcomings of Trump’s rollbacks and streamlining, as well as discordant interventionist elements that undermine or even, to borrow at term, swamp Trump’s deregulatory agenda altogether.
A century of enabling statutes erecting the administrative state as well as massive spending programs that pre-load regulation across the board are the primary vehicles for regulatory expansion, embedding mandates and incentives that no president can easily undo alone. Grants-in-aid, procurement rules, and delegated discretion increasingly ensure that regulatory policy continues to advance even when formal rulemaking slows, which is happening under Trump. Claims of historic deregulation must therefore be evaluated against the broader backdrop of federal spending, congressional disregard of enumerated powers when it comes to economic and social intervention, agency reach and accumulated administrative authority. To that, add Trump’s own regulatory proclivities.
With the executive now doing most lawmaking, Congress needs to reclaim its responsibilities. It can do this by overturning vague and broad statutes that have enabled the modern administrative state that operates almost without checks and balances from the other branches of government. At the very least, Congress should approve costly or controversial agency rules before they become binding. Congress should be held accountable for regulatory actions, not bureau personnel. This is a difficult project, in part because Congress likes being able to shift blame for unpopular spending and rules over to unelected bureaucracies.
Other reforms include regulatory sunsetting and budgeting; a regulatory reduction commission; and the limitation, streamlining, and inventorying of guidance documents to prohibit the rise of largely untraceable rule equivalents that can substitute for conventional rulemaking. Annual regulatory transparency report cards are needed to document and keep tabs on progress, as the administrative state has great resilience.
Takeaways
- Federal regulation’s total compliance costs and economic effects are at least $2.153 trillion annually, and certainly vastly higher. This marker is essentially unchanged from last year, as Trump’s reported annualized regulatory costs savings of approximately $15 billion are offset by inflation applied to legacy economic costs of coincidentally similar magnitude.
- An October 2023 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) report models regulatory compliance at $3.079 trillion annually. Other studies imply far higher costs. This report’s conservative placeholder is intended to induce Congress to enforce compliance with the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act’s requirement for an official aggregate estimate.
- US households pay on average $15,859 annually in a hidden regulatory tax, which consumes 15 percent of income and 20 percent of household expenses.
- These household outlays exceed expenditures on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings. Only the costs of housing, which stand at $26,266 annually, exceed regulation.
- The higher NAM figure implies $22,680 per household, or 29 percent of the household expense budget.
- The regulatory tax of $2.153 trillion rivals individual income taxes of $2.426 trillion for 2024 and stands at over four times corporate income tax collections of $530 billion.
- The NAM regulatory cost figure of $3.079 trillion annually exceeds the sum of both individual and corporate taxes ($2.956 trillion).
- If US regulation were a country, it would be the world’s 11th-largest economy, ranking behind the Russian Federation and ahead of the Korean Republic. The NAM cost figure of $3.079 trillion would peg the US regulations as 7th largest nation between France and Italy.
- Dead Tape: The 10.5 billion hours Washington says it took to complete federal paperwork according to the 2023 Information Collection Budget translate to the equivalent of 14,983 human lifetimes.
- Trump signed 22 Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions of disapproval—more than all such resolutions enacted prior to 2025 combined—overturning late-term Biden-era regulations.
- Since 1996, the year the CRA was passed, 107,650 rules have been issued. Given that only 42 resolutions of disapproval have been enacted to revoke final rules, that yields a rather uninspiring overturn success ratio of just 0.0004 percent. If deconstruction of the administrative state ever occurs, it will not happen by means of the CRA.
- Agencies under Trump issued 2,441 new final regulations in 2025, many of them deregulatory in nature. This is the lowest rule tally of all time, compared to the prior record low of 2,964 in 2019, also under Trump. Of 2025’s 2,441 rules, 243 belong to Biden, leaving Trump a net of 2,198. Trump’s stand as the only sub-3,000 annual rule counts since recordkeeping began in the 1970s. In Biden’s final year, for example, 3,248 final rules were issued. Before 2005, final rule counts always exceeded 4,000.
- The Federal Register containing those rules plummeted 43 percent, from Biden’s record-breaking tally of 106,109 pages to 60,917 pages.
- Congress enacted 133 laws in calendar year 2025, compared to those 2,441 rules. Thus, agencies issued rules at a pace of 18 for every law enacted by Congress.
- This Unconstitutionality Index—the ratio of regulations issued by agencies to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president—underlines how much agency lawmaking has significantly replaced that of elected officials. The average Index over the past 10 years is 22 rules for every law.
- Since the Federal Register first began itemizing final rules in 1976, 223,623 have been issued. Since 1993, when the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments appeared, agencies have issued 126,536 final rules.
- The last official White House Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations was a 2024 draft version covering fiscal year 2023. No reports for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 have been released. This year, therefore, the administration’s cost updates contained in its year-end Regulatory Reform under Executive Order 14192: Final Accounting for Fiscal Year 2025, or Final Accounting for short, are employed to update our aggregate cost placeholder in lieu of the official, statutorily required reporting.
- In this Final Accounting on EO 14192’s one-in, ten-out directive, OMB reports that agencies issued 646 deregulatory actions and five significant regulatory actions, for a ratio of 129-to-1.
- The administration’s Final Accounting asserts that “Regulations eliminated in 2025 will save about $211.8 billion in present and future regulatory costs across the government.” This present value, annualized with the Final Accounting’s “perpetual time horizon and a 7 percent discount rate” yields an annual savings figure of $14.8 billion employed in this report. Just three rules, however, account for over 80 percent of the declared savings.
- Conversely, but noted for context, in the draft 2024 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations only 19 major rules had both benefits and costs quantified. These, however, added $16.1 billion to the annual regulatory cost bill; another 10 rules with costs but not benefits quantified added another $1.94 billion to annual costs.
- A $2.153 trillion regulatory burden amounts to seven percent of 2025 US gross domestic product (GDP), estimated by the Commerce Department at $31.1 trillion. The NAM regulatory figure of $3.079 trillion implies regulatory costs of 10 percent of GDP.
- Regulatory costs exceed half the level of total 2024 corporate pretax profits of $4.179 trillion. The NAM figure would take that to 74 percent.
- When regulatory costs of $2.153 trillion are combined with 2025 federal outlays of $7.01 trillion, the federal government’s share of the $31.1 trillion economy reaches 30 percent. State and local spending and regulation add to these costs.
- The fall 2025 edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions was never issued. Given the September appearance of the spring edition, it is being treated as definitive for purposes of this report along with the Final Accounting.
- The spring 2025 edition of the Unified Agenda finds 69 federal departments, agencies, and commissions presenting 3,816 regulatory actions flowing through the pipeline as follows:
- 2,098 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase.
- 911 recently completed rules.
- 807 long-term rules.
- The five most active rule-producing executive branch entities in the Unified Agenda—the departments of Transportation, the Interior, the Treasury, Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency—account for 1,762 rules, or 46 percent of all rules in the pipeline. The five most active independent agencies account for another 346 rules.
- Of the 3,816 regulations in the spring 2025 Unified Agenda pipeline, 243 are economically significant rules (at least $100 million in economic effect), a number of them aimed at regulatory streamlining. They break down as follows:
- 148 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase.
- 40 completed rules.
- 55 long-term rules.
- The Government Accountability Office database of major rules as defined in the Congressional Review Act contains 79 finalized major rules (including deregulatory measures) for 2025 as of January 2026, down sharply from 168 under Biden in calendar year 2024.
- Final rules affecting small business as reported in the 2025 Federal Register fell to 599, down from 770 under Biden in 2024. Biden’s four years averaged 846 rules annually affecting small business, compared with 694 for Obama and 701 during Trump’s first term. Deregulatory measures are prominent in both Trump terms.
- Of the 3,816 rules and regulations in the spring 2025 Unified Agenda pipeline (active, completed, long-term), 655 affect small businesses; of those, 310 required an official regulatory flexibility analysis.
- Rules in the pipeline affecting state governments stand at 411, while rules affecting local governments stand at 279.
- From the nation’s founding through Biden, presidents issued over 15,661 executive orders. Trump issued 225 in 2025, more than John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Trump himself (2017-2020) each did during their entire four-year terms.
- Public notices in the Federal Register have always exceeded 22,000 annually, until 2025 when they fell to 19,280. (They had surged to 25,506 in 2024.) There have been 752,200 public notices since 1994 and over a million since the 1970s. While uncounted guidance documents and other proclamations having potential regulatory effect appear among public notices, most such guidance documents issued do not appear in the Federal Register at all.