Most American families spend more on regulatory compliance than they do on food, education, or any other expense besides housing. From zoning and permit restrictions to lumber and steel tariffs, the total regulatory bill for the average household is nearly $16,000 per year, or at least $2.1 trillion in total.

More than 3,000 new final regulations appeared in 2023. More than 3,600 are on the way, according to the most recent Unified Agenda, which tracks upcoming regulations. And that’s just the formal rulemaking.

Agencies often dodge the formal rulemaking process by issuing guidance documents, memoranda, and other unaccountable forms of regulatory “dark matter.” Nobody knows how much dark matter there is, but a Trump-era executive order uncovered at least 100,000 guidance documents.

Revealing guidance

Until the recent Loper Bright Supreme Court decision, courts would defer to agencies’ guidance documents for interpreting their rules, which essentially let agencies do anything they want. The ruling will help mitigate that problem, but thanks to President Joe Biden overturning Trump-era guidance portals, the public still has no consistent access to agency guidance documents to find out what’s in them.

The Guidance Out Of Darkness, sponsored by Republican senator Ron Johnson, would create a centralized portal where all agency guidance will be publicly accessible. It essentially codifies the Trump-era executive order.

The act has already passed the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs unanimously with bipartisan support. Biden has signaled that he will sign the act if it reaches his desk.

Another problem is that the executive branch now does most of the legislative branch’s job. For every bill that Congress passed last year, agencies issued 46 regulations. This is part of a long-running trend where the executive branch becomes more powerful at the other branches’ expense.

This must change. The whole point of the separation of powers is to limit the harm that any one administration can do. Imagine if The Other Side gained absolute control of the government, and you will understand why America limits and separates government powers.

Regulating regulations

The Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act, sponsored by Republican senator Rand Paul, would be a small step in restoring a proper separation of powers. It would require Congress to vote on larger executive branch regulations costing more than $100 million per year. This would ensure that agencies enact rules that follow the laws that Congress passes.

The REINS Act would prevent agencies from going rogue, as they have in recent years on issues ranging from wetlands regulation to net neutrality. The tradeoff would be an extra 30-to-40 congressional votes in most years, which is a small burden on a Congress that already holds hundreds of votes annually.

Yet another problem is regulations that linger on the books without anyone revisiting their value. There are currently more than a million regulatory restrictions spread across the Code of Federal Regulations’ 188,000 pages.

Neither Congress nor agencies are interested in cleaning out obsolete, redundant, and harmful rules from this massive stockpile.

The Locating the Inefficiencies of Bureaucratic Edicts to Reform And Transform the Economy Act, sponsored by Republican senator Mike Lee, would create an independent commission, inspired by the successful 1990s BRAC commissions that closed unneeded military bases after the Cold War ended. This bipartisan commission would assemble a package of unneeded rules to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

A problem with solutions

Over-regulation is one of the most serious problems America faces. Regulators have slowed down the pandemic response, are keeping new medical treatments off the market, are making housing more expensive, and are stopping people from creating businesses and jobs.

Fortunately, there are serious solutions to these problems. What we need are elected officials serious about helping America succeed.

Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Ryan Young is CEI’s Senior Economist.

First Published: August 16, 2024, 9:30 a.m.