The logbook of federal red tape last year came to…

By Ryan Smith of AEI.

"The Federal Register for 2024 closed out Joe Biden’s final year in office with a record 106,109 pages. This count swamps the previous record of 95,894 set by President Barack Obama in 2016. That’s a 19 percent leap over 2023’s total, and an impressive 32 percent long jump over the past decade.

The Federal Register, for the uninitiated, is the government’s daily repository of regulatory goings-on. It includes final rules, proposed rules, budget directives, and other forms of red tape from federal bureaucracies. While not every page represents a new rule, the size and growth of the Register remain valuable indicators of regulatory churn.

Since the first publication of Ten Thousand Commandments in 1993, 123,723 final rules have been unleashed on the public. Since 1976, when the Federal Register first began registering rules, the grand total stands at 220,813.

These rules dictate standards for everything from the amount of water appliances can use to what sorts of cars can be sold to how farmers grow food. Yet almost none of these rules passed through Congress first.

The Congressional Review Act (CRA), the one tool legislators currently have to check these rules, has only successfully overturned a few dozen out of the more than 104,000 rules issued since the CRA was signed into law in 1996. Once a regulation hits the books, it is likely there to stay.

A 106,109 page Federal Register may not directly raise your taxes, but it governs your thermostat, your appliances, your car, and many other aspects of your life."