The sprawling federal bureaucracy over the past decade imposed 20 new regulations on American businesses and citizens for every law passed, the latest indication that the “swamp” has taken control from Congress, according to a new report.
In detailing his “Unconstitutionality Index,” Clyde Wayne Crews, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that the explosion of regulations shows the growing impact of federal agencies.
“The unchanged point and takeaway of the ‘Unconstitutionality Index’ is that the unelected personnel of federal agencies created in the latter half of the United States’ existence, not elected members of Congress, do the bulk of lawmaking in America,” he wrote on Forbes.
Overall, he found that in the last decade, Congress approved 1,707 laws requiring regulations to enforce them and that the bureaucracy set in place 35,177 new rules.
His index is an off-shoot of his annual look at regulation. In a report he issued earlier this week, President Trump was credited for issuing the fewest regulations in 44 years.
The decade of regulatory increase came during much of the Obama administration. President Barack Obama’s administration had some record-breaking high indexes, including 51 in 2013, when his team instituted 3,659 new regulations for every law.
Of Trump, Crews said: “It is a notable achievement that all three of the lowest-ever annual rule counts belong to Trump. This an even more significant development given that some of Trump’s ‘rules’ are rules written to get rid of or replace other rules,” he said, explaining that rules are “any federal agency action affecting the public, that’s not a law from Congress, as it often should be.”
