In recent years, I’ve made the point that the economy has long been entangled with regulation that’s much like kudzu, an Asian plant introduced to the United States in the 1930s by the Department of Agriculture in an effort to help farmers retain eroding topsoil. Like kudzu, well-intentioned regulation has flourished to the point of seeming nearly uncontrollable.
Ultimately, kudzu planting was so successful that the government program supporting it came to a screeching halt. Kudzu had to be yanked up. Today, also perhaps as a result of too much of a good thing, our government is finally cutting back the regulatory vines. But of course, it’s a big job.
In the early kudzu-growing era, farmers were paid $8 per acre to plant the tuber. Ultimately, more than a million acres of farmland were encompassed by the ever-creeping vine. What had been eroded fields that could not support cultivation became kudzu-infested fields that could not support cultivation.
Kudzu was no respecter of fence lines. Once started, the vines climbed trees, encompassed barns, and even entangled power lines. In an effort to regain control of farming, the federal government finally declared kudzu to be a noxious weed and paid farmers not to plant it, but to wipe it out.
Now, it seems, the federal overseers of America’s regulatory kudzu patch are doing something similar. According to recent reports, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2017 and 2018 removed six existing regulations on the books for each one added. Furthermore, the EPA’s Office of Inspector General reports that the less-kudzu transition has saved taxpayers more than $96 million.
Now, indiscriminately cutting regulations like a machete-wielding farmer slashing away at a kudzu plant should not be the goal. The effectiveness of this reckoning depends on what regulations are wiped out and what replaces them, but that is just what the inspector general looked at when making its assessment.
The regulation removal program started in earnest shortly after President Trump took the oath of office. On Jan. 30, 2017, Executive Order 13771 was issued. It stated:
The U.S. was not the first country to embrace the notion of a regulatory wipe-out. In 2015, Canada put in place a rule that one existing rule be eliminated for each one added. The results have been encouraging, which is perhaps why we went one regulation better.
Regulation cutbacks, like kudzu control, can refresh the economic garden and bring about more innovation and productivity. But in kudzu control programs, it’s possible kudzu poison may spill onto beneficial plants and do a bit of damage. The same may be true with regulation removal, and that’s why the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs must ride herd on the regulation elimination process.
I doubt we will see a day when U.S. farmers start planting kudzu again, but I am dead certain that our days of regulation removal will pass.
Bruce Yandle is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University College of Business & Behavioral Science. He developed the “Bootleggers and Baptists” political model.
