While Washington rule makers made 19 fewer regulations in 2003 than they did in 2002, they lost no time issuing an astonishing 4,148 new rules in the 71,269-page Federal Register. The cost of these rules can never be fully known and appear nowhere in the federal budget, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a new Cato Institute report.
For the past eight years, Crews has analyzed countless pages of federal regulations in an attempt to make them more comprehensible in his report, 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.