The Patriot Post® · How to Rein in the Regulatory State

If you’ve been paying attention for, oh, the last several decades, you’ve likely noticed that the regulatory state has become our primary means of lawmaking. Even when Congress passes a sweeping law like ObamaCare, it leaves much of the rulemaking to faceless bureaucrats holed up somewhere in the bowels of our nation’s capital.

Each year, as it tracks this bureaucratic shadow government, the Competitive Enterprise Institute publishes a snapshot of the regulatory state called “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Sadly, this year’s version is beginning to resemble the Federal Register that it tracks, weighing in at a whopping 143 pages of text, graphs, and charts. Collectively, it paints a grim picture of an out-of-control Beltway bureaucracy.

One paragraph from the report crystallizes the problem: “In January 2023, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated U.S. current-dollar GDP for 2022 at $25.46 trillion. The total regulatory cost figure of $1.939 trillion annually is equivalent to approximately 8 percent of that amount. Combining regulatory costs with federal FY 2022 outlays of $6.272 trillion, the federal government’s share of the economy stood at some $8.2 trillion in 2022, or roughly 32 percent of GDP. None of these metrics include state and local spending and regulation.”

Even worse, CEI admits this is a very incomplete assessment: “Just as the economic calculations necessary to enable central economic planning are impossible, so are regulatory costs impossible to calculate. Disclosure is an important part of regulatory reform, but an important caveat is that the best possible guess for overall regulatory costs is an ‘idiosyncratic guesstimate.’ For several years, this report had used a baseline for across-the-board costs of federal regulation intervention of roughly $1.9 trillion annually, encompassing compliance costs, economic and GDP losses, social costs, and other costs.” In other words, CEI researchers don’t really know, but we suspect they’re unintentionally lowballing the total costs.

While CEI does a fine job of outlining the problem and suggesting how to handle it (hint: Congress would have to get off its collective duff and upset a few bureaucrats), the editorialists at the Washington Examiner think we should borrow an idea from the 1990s — the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. They write:

If the massive, unwieldy, and oft-abusive regulatory state is to be brought under control, both the Administrative Procedure Act and civil service laws need drastic reform. Because this will require a huge number of changes that will upset many political fiefdoms, Congress is probably incapable of completing the task through its ordinary operations. A commission modeled on the base closure commission or, better yet, the markedly successful Social Security commission in the early 1980s should be appointed. It should propose comprehensive reforms to each, with an eye also on the interplay between administrative rules and the laws governing the employment of those who implement them.

BRAC was successful because it allowed the government to do its job, though congressmen who had to explain to their constituents why the local military installation closed could conveniently point to a ruthless commission. It did its unpopular task while saving face for those who would otherwise be chastised for a cut that a more-or-less impartial and disinterested body deemed necessary.

With the wholesale change needed to right-size government, and with Congress unwilling to do the necessary oversight, a BRAC-style commission may be the way to go. It won’t happen with the Biden administration, but because the Democrats and their media brethren seem to believe that Donald Trump’s reelection would herald an “irreversible descent into dictatorship,” that may be the time for him to resume the meat cleaver approach he took to excessive regulation the last time he was in office. Perhaps the media needs to focus like Trump did on the real dictatorship in DC for a change.

Wouldn’t it be a relief if the CEI’s annual regulatory report became obsolete? Paring that report back to the original number of commandments would be a fine step in the right direction.