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Former President Obama made good on his effort to tie President Trump's hands with new regulations, adding $157 billion in new rules from Election Day to Inauguration Day alone. A new report from American Action Forum, which charts regulations, said that the administration published a full year's worth of new rules in just two months. "Throughout 2016, the administration averaged roughly 45 rules per month, including final and proposed measures. Then in November 2016, the administration managed to produce 57 rulemakings, an increase, but not statistically significant. By December, however, the administration approved more regulations (99) in that month than...

Just days before President-elect Trump is sworn in, the Obama administration implemented on Tuesday a major regulation that will govern rates and payments to insurers under Obamacare. The rule, which sets the plans that can be sold on the Affordable Care Act's exchanges in 2018, is common and must be issued to give insurers an idea of what to expect for the coming coverage year. However, the Obama administration implemented the regulation much earlier than years past, and some in the GOP are worried it could complicate the incoming administration's efforts to provide regulatory relief to insurers.

President Obama has issued 145 “midnight” regulations with a cost of more than $21 billion since the election of Donald Trump, the most by a lame-duck president in a generation, a study has found. The conservative American Action Forum said Thursday that Mr. Obama’s rules, issued from Nov. 8 through Dec. 31 of last year, include 31 “economically significant” regulations with a cost of at least $100 million each.

President Obama, who this week has issued a flurry of environmental rules, is planning to unleash another set of "midnight regulations" right before he leaves office that will cost Americans $6 billion. Obama has already broken all past records on creating federal regulations and red tape, and his new adds will boost the overall price tag to over $1 trillion. The new regulations, according to the watchdog group American Action Forum, include four from the Environmental Protection Agency and one from Interior. "These five measures alone could impose $5.1 billion in costs and more than 350,000 paperwork burden hours. In...

President Obama has just set a new record for rules and regulations, his administration spitting out 527 pages worth in just one day, as he races to put his fingerprint on virtually every corner of American life and business. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the administration has just shattered the old record for pages of regulations and rules published by the in-house journal, the Federal Register. At 81,640 total pages for 2016, it ranks first and 235 pages more than all of those published in 2010, the previous record. What's more, there are still about 26 working days left...

President Obama has implemented more costly rules and swamped America with more federal red tape than any other administration, and now he has set another regulatory record: his team has filled 70,000 pages in the Federal Register faster than any other president. Team Obama crossed the 70,000-page mark this week and is on schedule to print seven of the fattest eight Federal Registers in history, according to a new analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Vice President of Policy Clyde Wayne Crews. "Let's put this in some perspective," said Crews in the report provided to Secrets. "The day after Columbus...

The Obama administration is shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three — all to beat a May 23 deadline to prevent a President Donald Trump from overturning them. A total of 195 regulations have been pushed through since Jan. 1 at an estimated cost of $69.5 billion to the nation’s businesses, according to the conservative American Action Forum. One of the most significant — a sweeping rule that will extend overtime pay to more than 4 million people without any input from Congress — was released Tuesday night. “This regulatory onslaught has...

On Sept. 29, Congress held a hearing on the rules proposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would likely destroy much of the small-dollar loan industry and drive many low-income and poor credit-risk people into the arms of loan sharks. [snip] ...the black marketeers will be the only ones serving the poor. [snip] The Internal Revenue Service’s new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act regulations have made it both very expensive and, in many cases, impossible for Americans living abroad to obtain bank accounts in the countries where they live. The new IRS and Treasury “know your customer” regulations...

Original headline-Report: Cost of Federal Regulation Reached $1.88 Trillion in 2014 U.S. debt exceeds the size of China’s economy The cost of federal regulation neared $2 trillion in 2014, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, a report by Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI’s vice president for policy, also reveals that the U.S. debt now exceeds the size of China’s economy. “Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices,” amounting to roughly...

Energy and environmental regulations finalized by the Obama administration in the past five years come with a hefty price tag of $460.5 billion, according to data compiled by a center-right think tank. The American Action Forum’s Regulation Rodeo database shows that the Obama administration finalized 275 energy and environment regulations between 2009 and 2014, with the price tag of each regulation averaging $1.75 billion. And that doesn’t even consider the paperwork companies will have to complete. AAF data shows that Obama’s energy regulations have burdened Americans with 24.3 million paperwork hours. That means every year, Americans have to complete an...

When I came to Washington years ago, I had a revolutionary glimmer in my eye. I hated big government and I wanted to join a political movement to dismantle it. That was a long time ago, yet sometimes that rage kicks in when I read about the creeping socialism that is slowly destroying America.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) put out a study today titled “Ten Thousand Commandments – An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” The results will make you spitting mad.The author Wayne Crews, Vice President for Policy at CEI, found that federal regulation cost $1.88 trillion in...

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter said that while most Americans were dining on their Thanksgiving turkey, the Obama administration was cooking up a regulatory stew of its own.“While most of America was enjoying their turkey and stuffing, the administration was stuffing our economy with burdensome and expensive regulations,” Vitter said.Last week, the Obama administration revealed its Unified Regulatory Agenda for the fall of 2013. It included 134 pending regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency alone. The EPA is working to finalize rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, lower sulfur emissions from fuels, set ambient air quality standards,...

This is getting old. Painfully, egregiously old.Despite President Obama’s assiduous promises that he would scrupulously avoid raising taxes whatsoever on the middle class, the CBO released yet another of its revised reports yesterday, informing us that the ObamaCare mandate tax is going to overwhelmingly impose itself upon members of the middle class, with an average penalty to the tune of $1,200. Lovely.And today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute via the Washington Examiner has more info concluding that current federal regulations, in addition to ObamaCare's upcoming regulations, impose a cost on individuals and businesses that amounts to more than twenty times what...

Current federal regulations plus those coming under Obamacare will cost American taxpayers and businesses $1.8 trillion annually, more than twenty times the $88 billion the administration estimates, according to a new roundup provided to Secrets from the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. And it could grow, warned the author of the report, Clyde Wayne Crews, a CEI vice president. Complying with Health and Human Services Department requirements alone, he revealed, costs $184 billion a year, yet regulators are still drafting the rules for the 2,400-page Obamacare law that kicks into gear in 2014. Crews has made a working project of his...

Dear Concerned American: The Obama bureaucracy is out of control, and I need your help to stop it. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) allows Congress to overturn outrageous regulations like the bureaucratic power grabs rammed through the Obama Labor Board. S.J. Res. 36 is a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that would prevent implementation of the NLRB's "ambush" election rules. You see, this proposal would diminish employees' ability to make a fully informed decision by reducing time in which the process occurs from the current average of 38 days to as little as one week. Worse, allowing the new rules will...

Some 10,215 new federal regulations from the Obama administration are costing consumers, businesses and the economy overall $46 billion annually, more than five times the regulatory price tag of former President Bush in his first three years in office. Worse: just implementing those regulations had a one-time additional cost of $11 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis provided to Washington Secrets.