Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy has taken charge of the nation by turning laws passed by Congress into a mind-boggling series of often costly rules and regulations.
The unelected “swamp” that President-elect Donald Trump promised to drain last year issued an average of 19 new rules and regulations for every single law passed, an “unconstitutional” effort that has been allowed to go on for years.
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“While many laws address routine matters like post office renamings. recent major legislation — such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — fuels expansive and expansive rulemakings. This dynamic enables agencies to subsequently implement substantial policy changes without direct congressional oversight, often bypassing notice-and-comment rules with informal guidance, policy statements, memoranda and other forms of regulatory dark matter,” according to regulatory watchdog Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Crews, at the end of each year, compiles a report on the laws Congress approves and compares it to the rules and regulations bureaucracies turn those laws into.
Some new laws are simple. But many are complicated and agencies spit out lists of regulations that bureaucrats believe are needed to fulfill what they think Congress wanted.
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While those are published in the Federal Register, Congress often moves on and doesn’t follow-up with what federal agencies do with the laws they passed. Those regulations can be much more impactful than how lawmakers viewed their law, prompting Crews to call his findings the “Unconstitutionality Index.”
Last year, for example, he said that Congress approved 175 laws. The swamp turned those into 3,248 new rules and regulations.
And, he said, there are more coming from the Biden administration before President Joe Biden leaves office.
The number in his Unconstitutionality Index fluctuates every year, but the ratio is always in the double digits.
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“The new Index (preliminary, but reliable as I monitor inbound official archiving) is a sharp decline from 44 the previous year. However, fluctuations in agency rule counts and legislative activity, like President Biden’s December 23 signing spree, can cause significant year-to-year swings,” Crews said in his report.
He added, “Despite annual variability, the Index consistently reveals Congress’s abdication of its constitutional role in lawmaking, allowing federal agencies to dominate certain aspects of policy creation.”