Wayne Crews: Mapping Washington’s lawlessness, 2017 edition

3.14.2017

Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Vice President of Policy Wayne Crews has published a new edition of his “Inventory of Regulatory Dark Matter.” In the report, Mr. Crews writes:

Congress passes and the President signs several dozen laws every year. Meanwhile, federal departments and agencies issue well over 3,000 regulations of varying significance. A weekday never passes without new regulations being issued or proposed. Yet beyond those rules, Congress lacks a clear grasp of the amount and cost of the thousands of executive branch and federal agency proclamations and issuances, including guidance documents, memoranda, bulletins, circulars, and letters that carry practical (if not always technically legally) binding regulatory effect. There are hundreds of “significant” agency guidance documents now in effect, plus many thousands of other such documents that are subject to little scrutiny or democratic accountability.

Mr. Crews provides a partial inventory of this “regulatory dark matter” in the report, and outlines the steps that Congress should take to address over-regulation. You can read it here.