Eight months ago, President Obama signed with great fanfare an executive order directing federal departments and agencies to review regulations and repeal or cancel those that “stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” It made for great White House public relations, but it didn’t stop the federal bureaucracy from churning out a record number of new regulations. A new report from the House Oversight and Government Operations Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., provides concrete evidence of Obama’s regulatory surge: “The number of pages in the Federal Register is at an all-time high. Pages devoted to final rules rose by 20 percent between 2009 and 2010, and proposed rules have increased from 2,044 in 2009 to 2,439 in 2010.

“Further, of the 4,257 regulatory actions in the pipeline, 219 are considered economically significant, meaning they are estimated to impose a cost of $100 million or more on the economy. By comparison, that is 28 more than this time last year, and 47 more than in 2009. In total, the Obama administration has imposed 75 new major regulations costing over $38 billion annually.” Every dollar spent and hour devoted to complying with this blizzard of new federal rules could have been more productively invested by businesses small and large, creating new jobs and economic opportunities for millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans.