By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | January 07, 2025
On Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed a raft of executive orders, one of which we said was “almost entirely overlooked but could easily end up having the biggest impact.”
Turns out we were right.
The executive order – “Modernizing Regulatory Review” – would, we predicted, “unleash the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.”
With this one executive order, Biden shows that he’s intent on giving regulators carte blanche to impose massive new rules on businesses and households, on virtually anything and everything they do, regardless of costs. There’s little else Biden has done so far that will have as wide-ranging an impact.
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews explains, that order “undermined the crucial watchdog mission of the White House Office of Management and Budget,” which had served as a check on the administrative state. “The federal government’s sole watchdog … has been transformed into a cheerleader for regulation.”
The CEI publishes the definitive guide to federal regulation each year, called “10,000 Commandments.”
Last week, the Federal Register, which is the repository of Washington’s rules and regulations, provided the latest evidence that Biden let regulators off the chain.
The 2024 Federal Register weighed in at 107,262 pages – the most in history and a 45% increase from Biden’s first year in office.
Last year, alone, Biden finalized 3,248 rules, of which 343 were deemed “significant,” meaning they added more than $200 million in compliance costs.
Earlier this year, the American Action Forum put the price tag of Biden’s rules-and-regulations-frenzy at $1.37 trillion, leading the House Budget Committee chairman to note that “This is a staggering 45 times the regulatory costs accumulated under President Trump and almost five times the regulatory costs added under President Obama.”
The problem is that reining in the regulatory state won’t be easy, even with a committed deregulator in the White House.
As it stands, repealing an existing regulation requires that the administration go through the laborious process of writing a new rule, which then opens it up to delays and legal challenges, including from special interests that benefit from the current rules.
Trump was just getting on roll with this effort when his first term ended. So there’s hope that he will be off to a running start come Jan. 20, with plans to repeal as many of Biden’s – and Obama’s – rules as possible.
But more needs to be done. Congress has the power to permanently hamper the regulatory state with legislation that requires all rules to expire every five years unless a new rule is written, and justified, to keep it in place. It can and should also require that any significant new regulation take effect only with an affirmative vote by Congress.
Dismantling the regulatory leviathan – and destroying this terrible Biden legacy – will take a full-scale, concerted, no-holds-barred, effort.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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