His high-spending agenda stalled in the Senate, President Joe Biden has released former President Donald Trump’s brakes on federal regulations and is unleashing a “big ban reinflation” to push his programs through the back door, according to a key watchdog.
In opening the regulations spigot, he is also boosting the costs and size of the federal government to new highs as he moves to make good on his trillion-dollar promises to liberals, said Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president of policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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“We are in the throes of a Big Bang reinflation of the regulatory state,” Crews said in a pre-State of the Union memo.
“When politicians find it difficult to raise taxes to pay for their policy goals, they regulate and issue decrees,” he said. “Much of the economy has long been extensively directed by Washington regulators rather than market forces, and Biden is ‘trillioning down’ on that, putting competitive enterprise into what will be even greater binds in the future.”
Trump put the squeeze on regulations, bringing his hatred of costly rules with him into the Oval Office. For example, he required agencies to kill one regulation for every new one they created, initially killing rules at a 16-1 rate.
But under Biden, that decree was killed — as were efforts to bring transparency to regulations, Crews said.
“Since one of the first Biden administration actions was to jettison regulatory cost-benefit analysis and convert the Office of Management and Budget’s regulatory watchdog role to one of advancing’ regulatory initiatives, the regulatory ‘debt is climbing too, along with the fiscal one,” said Crews, one of a handful of Washington experts on the impact of regulations.
With regulators working overtime and Congress looking the other way, Crews said the White House could get part of Biden’s agenda done, including the stalled $2 trillion Build Back Better legislation. He compared Biden’s blueprint to former President Barack Obama, who bragged about using executive orders and regulations to put his agenda in place after Republicans took control of Congress.
He predicted Biden would send signals in his State of the Union address that he would govern as Obama did: with a “pen and a phone” instead of legislating.
“Biden’s sweeping interventions are rooted in the waging of domestic forever wars advancing a broad progressive agenda from child care to free education to income support. Most significantly, though, are ‘whole of government’ campaigns to advance ‘equity and mitigate the supposed climate crisis,” Crews said.
Crews said Biden has started “echoing the ‘pen and phone’ Barack Obama invoked, showing a willingness to act without Congress by presidential decree, as Biden already attempted with vaccine mandates.”
