Biden breaks Federal Register record

By Clyde Wayne Crews of CEI.

"Joe Biden’s administration has set a new Federal Register record with 96,088 pages as of December 3, 2024, surpassing the Obama administration’s 95,894 pages in 2016. With just weeks remaining in the year, the Register—Washington’s daily depository of proposed and final rules—is on track to exceed 100,000 pages for the first time in history.

As I noted in Forbes today, Federal Register page counts are a highly imperfect gauge of regulatory burden. Biden’s milestone, though, still underscores the expanding scope of federal intervention. Biden’s policies reflected a sharp departure from Trump-era efforts to streamline regulation instead embracing whole-of-government approaches to climate policy, equity, and other forms of economic and social engineering that we have detailed in Ten Thousand Commandments and elsewhere.

By comparison with Biden, Trump’s first year in office (2017) closed with “only” 61,067 pages in the Register, the lowest count since the Clinton administration. Trump’s “one-in, two-out” rulemaking directive significantly stalled regulatory output. However, efforts to eliminate rules nonetheless required agencies to issue new ones under the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment process, and emergency COVID-19 measures also inflated the Register’s page count at the end of the Trump term. The result, as I noted in a chart at Forbes, was that Trump garnered one of the top-five page counts.

So far in 2024, 2,882 final rules have been issued within those 96,088 pages, including 293 rules deemed significant. Small businesses are notably vulnerable, with 698 rules affecting them—66 of which are deemed significant.

The scale of regulatory output raises fresh questions about transparency and accountability. Despite having ample resources to provide for metrics other than Federal Register pages and rule counts, and to better quantify regulatory burdens, Washington continues to resist legislative reforms. The incoming administration promises bold measures, including a one-in, ten-out framework, but genuine reform will require more than executive action and the engagement of Congress.

As I discuss often these days, the fusion of spending and regulation compounds the problem of unbounded federal intervention. Subsidies, grants, and contracts increasingly serve as vehicles bypassing traditional rulemaking processes. Addressing this will demand new tools, perhaps including a Congressional Office of Regulatory Analysis, to ensure greater transparency and oversight.

The record-setting 2024 Federal Register provides a stark reminder of the scale of the regulatory state, and it ain’t even done yet.

For more, with descriptive tables, see “Biden’s 2024 Federal Register Page Count Is Already The Highest Ever,” Forbes"