Editor’s Note: The failure of procedural requirements to slow the flow of regulations demonstrates that what is needed is a regulatory budget which would place a ceiling, by an act of Congress not a unilateral action by the Executive Branch, on the total cost that a particular regulatory agency can impose on the public to comply with its regulations. See here.
From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
It is puzzling. Administrative agencies continue to produce thousands of rules each year in the face of an accumulation of procedural requirements that administrative law scholars say have ossified rulemaking and even led some agencies to retreat from rulemaking altogether.
How can this be? How can federal regulatory output be “rising steadily for decades” notwithstanding procedures that have created a supposedly “confusing labyrinth through which agencies seeking to adopt rules must grope”? As someone who has long been puzzled by the seeming contradiction between expectations and reality, I liked reading Connor Raso’s recent article, Agency Avoidance of Rulemaking Procedures, because it offers a persuasive, even if partial, answer to a core conundrum about rulemaking, along with thoughtfully-analyzed, supportive empirical evidence.
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