News Release

July 8, 2003

Media Contact: (202) 789-5200

Under Bush, Federal Regulators Are Breaking Records
To control regulation, Congress needs to be held accountable for agencies' rulemaking

WASHINGTON -- In President Bush's second year in office, the Federal Register, a chronicle of all regulations proposed and enacted by federal agencies, held an extraordinary 75,606 pages of new rules. That's about 300 pages issued each business day during 2002. Not only is that a new record for the Bush administration, but it's an all-time record for any presidential administration, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. of the Cato Institute.

Every year for the past seven years Crews has analyzed countless pages of federal regulation data and documented it in Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. He examines the process behind creating these rules, why it's nearly impossible for the government to accurately assess what they cost, and he provides a way by which Congress can rein in the agencies behind the nonstop rule making.

In 2001, President Bush's first year in office, the Federal Register contained 69,591 pages, 7 percent less than President Clinton's record-setting 2000 edition, which contained 74,528 pages. However, in its second year in Washington, the Bush administration topped Clinton's record by over 1,000 pages.

Crews' findings this year also include:

• While Congress passed and the president signed 269 bills into law in 2002, regulatory agencies issued a whopping 4,167 final rules, evidence that unelected federal regulators do a considerable bulk of the lawmaking in the United States.
• As of October 2002, there were 4,187 regulations at various stages of implementation; of those, 135 were deemed economically significant, costing a total of at least $13.5 billion.
• Economists have shown that regulations cost consumers and businesses $860 billion in 2002. That's 8.2 percent of the U.S. GDP.
• Regulatory costs of $860 billion far exceed Canada's entire GDP, and exceed all corporate pretax profits.
• The five most active rule-producing agencies (the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency) account for 50 percent of all regulations under consideration.

The best way to monitor regulation-happy federal agencies is to make Congress directly accountable for the regulations, according to Crews. He suggests a system in which Congress is required to approve all significant regulations proposed by the agencies.

"By regulating instead of spending, government can expand almost indefinitely without explicitly taxing anyone a single penny," writes Crews. "Making Congress accountable for regulation in the same manner it is accountable for ordinary government spending is the only way to head off this sort of manipulation."

Khristine Brookes, Vice President for Communications
(202) 218-4628, kbrookes@cato.org

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