The government is so big, it has no idea how big it actually is.
It might be just 60 agencies, as the Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions cites.
But the Administrative Conference of the United States source book counts 115 government Agencies.
A Federal Register Index lists 257 agencies.
The United States Government Manual? 316.
And a 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing listed more than 430, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute noted the impossible-to-answer question as evidence of bureaucracy sprawl.
Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at CEI, sees a problem that goes beyond a lack of basic knowledge.
“If nobody knows how many agencies exist whose decrees we must abide, that means we don’t know how many people work for the government (let alone contractors making a living from taxpayers) nor know how many rules there are,” he wrote.
The background sprawl and increasing opacity make it difficult for citizens to stay within the law because it’s so difficult to know what the law dictates.
When little-known agencies enforce regulations and carry out the mechanisms of the law, the environment is ripe for abuse of power.
