Free Republic

At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump’s regulatory reform project going? Better than Obama, Bush II, and Clinton in terms of fewer regulations; but not as good as Trump’s own first year. Let’s look at it. Monday, December 31, 2018, is the last federal workday of the year. That would seem obvious, but a partial federal shutdown on December 22 made clock-out earlier for some. Nonetheless, a preliminary tally for Federal Register page and rule counts for Trump’s 2nd calendar year has appeared, even though “[d]uring the funding lapse, Federalregister.gov is not being supported." The Number of Pages in...

The annual Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities is quite overdue. It is the federal government’s only report disclosing overall costs and benefits of federal regulations. How is it that the federal government meanwhile has no trouble issuing new regulations? Today the Federal Register topped 50,000 pages for 2016. That is a record pace. Last year’s 2015 Draft, appearing on October 16, was the latest ever […] The Final 2015 report didn’t appear until March 10, 2016. This is 2016, and Monday it will be August....

Congress passed a historically low number of laws in 2013, but the executive branch bureaucrats who write the nation's federal regulations remained as busy as ever, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, demonstrated with a single picture. "Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register," Lee wrote in a caption for a photo posted to his Facebook page on Friday. "It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law...

The Obama Administration on Tuesday proposed new regulations that add to the list of benefits not subject to reforms under the president’s healthcare law. A draft rule issued jointly by the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury is the latest in a series of tweaks to the Affordable Care Act announced just days before major parts of the law are to take effect. The regulations, published in Tuesday's Federal Register, amend the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which laid out a category of “excepted benefits.” These include workers compensation or disability coverage, accidental death...

The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s. Agencies are also permitted to submit the documents on CD-ROMs and floppy disks, but not on flash drives or SD cards. “The Federal Register Act says that an agency has to submit the original and two duplicate originals or two certified copies,” said Amy P. Bunk, The Federal Register’s director of legal affairs and policy. As long as an agency...

Top of Page 34,553 TABLE 3—ESTIMATES OF THE CUMULATIVE PERCENTAGE OF EMPLOYER PLANS RELINQUISHING THEIR GRANDFATHERED STATUS, 2011–2013 Bottom of Page 34,552 "Under this assumption, the Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013. The low-end estimates are for 49 percent and 34 percent of small and large employer plans, respectively, to have relinquished grandfather status, and the high-end estimates are 80 percent and 64 percent, respectively."

Remember Barack Obama’s pledge to make this the Most Transparent Administration Evah? Josh Gerstein at Politico notices a few items that seem to have slipped by the national media, thanks to a lack of openness on the part of Obama’s communications team. Obama issued three executive orders and a handful of regulations without ever announcing them: In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama shut down his predecessor’s system for reviewing regulations, realigned and expanded two key White House policymaking bodies and extended economic sanctions against parties to the conflict in the African nation of Cote D’Ivoire. Despite the...

In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama shut down his predecessor’s system for reviewing regulations, realigned and expanded two key White House policymaking bodies and extended economic sanctions against parties to the conflict in the African nation of Cote D’Ivoire. Despite the intense scrutiny a president gets just after the inauguration, Obama managed to take all these actions with nary a mention from the White House press corps. The moves escaped notice because they were never announced by the White House Press Office and were never placed on the White House web site. They came to light only...

The Defense Department and other federal agencies may soon be able to implement new drug testing for its work force that will include testing hair, sweat and saliva to detect drug abuse. Army Col. Mick Smith, senior staff officer for drug demand reduction at DoD's counternarcotics office, said the new procedures will be permitted once the Department of Health and Human Services approves proposed guidelines for the test and DoD completes a subsequent internal approval process. Those guidelines awaiting DHHS approval will outline quality standards for new types of drug tests, specifically testing hair, oral fluid, sweat and urine, using...

As the market slumps, Republicans who have held some measure of congressional power since 1994 must now expect to hear a predictable braying from the other side of the aisle: "See, we told you profligate tax cuts and the wanton slashing of wise and prudent government regulations were bound to lead to trouble!" But have Republicans really kept their eight-year-old promise to cut federal red tape? Actually, Cato Institute scholar Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. has been issuing for the past six years an annual report on the cost of regulation to the American economy. And this year's edition of...