Happy New Regulatory Year
Obama plans to make his final year another record for rule-by-decree.
President Obama announced in his New Year’s weekend address that because Congress hasn’t followed his orders, he plans to issue new unilateral regulations on guns. This will continue the government-by-decree that is making Mr. Obama the most prolific American regulator of all time.
Unofficially, Mr. Obama’s Administration has once again broken its own record by issuing a staggering 82,036 pages of new and proposed rules and instructions in the Federal Register in 2015. We say unofficially because Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who tracks these regulations, warns that the final number will likely come down by a few hundred pages when the official National Archives tally is released, without the blank pages that sometimes appear in daily publication.
So let’s assume Team Obama churned out 81,700 pages of official red tape this year. That would not only eclipse Mr. Obama’s record of 81,405 set in 2010; it would also give him six of the seven most prolific years of regulating in the history of the American republic. He’s a champion when it comes to limiting economic freedom, and American workers have the slow growth in jobs and wages to prove it.
Mr. Obama’s dominance in issuing new diktats from Washington is not limited to formal rule-making, in which the public has a chance to review and comment on proposals before they are enacted. His Administration is also in a class by itself in issuing de facto rules as “notices” or “guidance” that are ignored by businesses at their peril. Many of these ukases from Washington never even make it into the Federal Register, so Mr. Obama’s record-breaking official totals understate the depth and breadth of his regulating.
A recent report from the National Federation of Independent Business calls this “underground regulation” and notes that the Supreme Court has only encouraged Obama-era abuse by affirming that federal agencies have wide latitude to issue “interpretations” of federal laws and even to change these interpretations without going through a formal rule-making.
And there’s much more to come. This year the Administration plans to issue new or final rules restricting legal arbitration, mandating overtime pay for millions of workers, punishing payday lenders, further regulating financial advisers, limiting methane emissions from oil and gas drilling, and further reducing silica dust exposure in the workplace. We’ve probably forgotten a few.
The media will ignore most of this, but the costs will affect every American
