Posted on 11/13/2016 7:36:30 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
On this, the day after the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president (yes, he has already updated his Twitter profile), President Barack Obama’s 2016 Federal Register page count stands at a record-level 78,898.
The Federal Register, so emblematic of Washington excess, is where the hundreds of Washington bureaucracies post their proposed and final rules and regulations each day.
Obama will break his own all-time record of 81,405 pages even before December gets here. Of the ten highest-ever Federal Register page counts, the incumbent president will own seven of them.
Within those pages, several thousand rules get issued annually, no matter which party holds the Oval Office. Big government is bipartisan.
This all matters because, in reaction to expanding regulation, president-elect Trump called for a moratorium and for a 70 percent reduction in regulations during the campaign.
He’ll need to work with Congress to do anything close to the latter ambition (toned down some by an aide), especially since many crony types like regulations just the way they are, let alone progressives who like to rule above all else. But there are a number of things he can do on his own in the meantime.
That is to say, the “pen and phone” made famous by Obama can be used to advance liberty rather than curtail it (and, within the rule of law, no less)
A quick lesson can be learned from Ronald Reagan. Via executive order (E.O. 12291), he set up the still-existing procedure whereby regulations are reviewed by the White House, and in some cases (alas, too few then and now) receive cost-benefit analysis.
The process has been weakened in the decades since. But a fast reduction in Federal Register page counts and in number of rules is possible simply by having a president concerned about regulatory excess, who expects sanity.
In Reagan’s case, his 1981 version of the administrative pen and phone to restrain the regulatory state arguably made a big difference in regulatory volume, at least for a few years.
Federal rules dropped from the all-time high of 7,745 to as low as 4,589, while Federal Register pages that stood at 73,258 in 1980 hit a low of 44,812. (For details and charts, see ” Channeling Reagan by Executive Order: How the Next President Can Begin Rolling Back the Obama Regulation Rampage.”)
Now, executive actions cannot suffice and more permanent, legislatively instituted reforms are needed. President-elect Trump can easily collaborate with the new 115th Congress on these. Abusive and alarmist agencies themselves need to be legislatively targeted, and we need an advanced program of eliminating agencies and rolling back their powers, if legitimate in the first place, securing authority with the states and the people. That’s the forgotten principle of federalism.
The entire process and institution of the modern out-of-control “administrative state” has got to be reined in. There should be no costly or controversial rule allowed to be issued without Congress’ affirmation (examples go on but include recent bureaucratic forays such as the overtime rule, net neutrality and Environmental Protection Agency excesses like the Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan).
Unelected bureaucrats making sweeping rules governing (and wrecking) entire sectors of the economy needs to be a thing of the past. Conservatives seeking to rationalize delegation or who’ve made peace with it are not helpful to the cause of substantial reestablishment of constitutional bounds on the state. They are playing in a sandbox on the progressives’ administrative-state beach.
We can revive the separation of powers, and enshrine checks and balances that restrain. We need an executive, legislature, and judiciary, not today’s rock, paper, scissors. Special, new emphasis and care must be brought to bear on agencies’ back door rulemaking, whereby agencies use guidance, memoranda, bulletins, circulars and other regulatory dark matter to implement policy, as highlighted by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota) and James Lankford (R-Oklahoma). Note the bipartisan concern.
President-elect Trump may also appreciate that some in Congress appear very eager to implement a regulatory budget. Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia), Budget Committee Chairman, has held hearings on the idea (which has bipartisan roots) and released a working paper. A statement of principles on regulatory budgeting was incorporated into the fiscal 2017 Budget Resolution; Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced legislation to implement a regulatory budget, while also incorporating regulatory dark matter, in the 114th Congress, and will likely reintroduce it; and Rep. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, included it in his widely touted BetterWay task force recommendations.
Part of the interest in a regulatory budget likely stems from the parallel, related campaign for dynamic scoring, since regulations have macroeconomic effect. To work properly and to be manageable, agencies need to be downsized ahead of time.
As the 115th Congress contemplates broad economic liberalization, Trump can jumpstart things with executive orders and oversight. Reagan showed that the president, within the rule of law, can do a lot. Trump promised action, and there are significant things he can do while permanent legislative reforms are pending. Below is a list, with links to more detail.
How the New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy:
The Office of No?
That’s a great start.
CRUSH THESE COMMUNISTS!! No Damned mercy. If these bastards want to come to disrupt D.C.— Let’s bring it !! ( in cars) — can’t fly with guns.
De-fund agencies and expose their employees to legal action.
PING!
If you have a CCW, the cops will pull you over long before you get there. The FBI illegally obtained CCW records from all the states and make them available to law enforcement. Their license plate scanners will flag you as you drive by.
Trump has already laid out his 100 day agenda, without, I suspect, input from anyone with the crazy middle name.
He should sign an executive order eliminating all federal regulations created during the last 10 years except for the FAA. For the few good ones, they can be fast tracked back into being. Alternatively suspend all those regulations until they can be vetted. Then eliminate the greatest part of them.
Yeah, just leave it up to them, okay? U-asshole!
Thanks for posting.
“If you have a CCW, the cops will pull you over long before you get there. The FBI illegally obtained CCW records from all the states and make them available to law enforcement. Their license plate scanners will flag you as you drive by..”
This is why CCW “permits” are an affront to the Second Amendment. I submit that they actually “single you out” to “law enforcement,” and that we may be better off not to have them at all in terms of our own self-protection. What the cops don’t know about you makes you safer.
The above is insufficient because it buys into the premise that administrative agencies should have the power to issue rules without final concurrence of Congress. I believe this was first proposed by Progressives (e.g., Wilson, then FDR) under the assumption that Congress was too dumb to make all the laws to govern a modern society, so elites should make and enforce them.
Agencies making “rules” which have the force of law are blatantly unconstitutional, since all legislative functions are relegated to Congress. Congress should pass a law to require every proposed “rule” to be forwarded to Congress for consent.
I agree. Levin has something similar proposed in The Liberty Amendments for regulations costing $100 million or more. Alas, that’s probably not good enough, since the agencies can get around it by making a forest of little rules.
Crazy middle name? Like Hussein? Rodham? Wayne?
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