Swamp dishes most regulations in nearly three decades

Federal agencies under White House control issued the most regulations for every law passed in nearly three decades, the latest sign that the president’s team is using red tape to force its agenda on the country.

For every law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, agencies issued 46 regulations, the highest percentage since 1995.

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“The upshot here is that 46 agency rules were issued for every law passed by Congress in 2023, compared to 13 the year before,” analyst Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said.

“The average over the past decade has been 24 rules issued for every law passed,” he added.

The explosion of federal regulations targeting Main Street and Wall Street is mostly the result of gridlock in Washington. Since Biden doesn’t have a supermajority in Congress to help with his agenda, much of the governing is given to agency administrators. Congress can overrule regulations but rarely does so.

Crews called that the “Unconstitutionality Index” because it allows agencies to bypass Congress in expanding federal growth.

“The Unconstitutionality Index provides appropriate big-picture framing and context about rules, flows, magnitudes, the outsized agency role in lawmaking, and the disinclination on the part of Congress to jealously guard that task,” he said on Wednesday in a blog post on Forbes.

“Furthermore, on top of executive branch rulemaking, the reach of executive orders, memoranda, agency notices, administrative interpretations and other bits of regulatory dark matter are substantial and can sometimes substitute for formal lawmaking,” he added.

There is other proof that Biden is pushing through a higher percentage of regulations on businesses. One simple example is the size of the Federal Register, the daily listing of new regulations. At just over 90,000 pages last year, it was the second-highest total ever.

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Crews said it is up to Congress to take charge of regulators and limit what red tape they can issue.

“As the debt limit fight looms in 2024, there will be fireworks aplenty over spending. But there may also be more attention paid to the legislative/regulatory state’s contribution to federal bulk. Rather than fixating on ‘getting things done’ — rather than seeing a low number of laws or regulation as ‘dysfunction’ — an alternative take is to appreciate the need to ‘Get Things Undone in 2024,’” he said.