How “Regulatory Dark Matter” Blocks Innovation

Learn Liberty discusses “regulatory dark matter” with Clyde Wayne Crews.

The Trump administration’s desire to get rid of unnecessarily burdensome and unwise regulations is laudable, but fulfilling that desire won’t be easy. Nor will it be sufficient to give the economy the boost they’re hoping for. The federal regulatory colossus reaches into virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives via a number of murky programs and actions that will continue to hinder economic growth if left in place.

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute refers to such government actions as “regulatory dark matter.” Like the difficult-to-detect and virtually invisible dark matter of the universe, regulatory dark matter consists of bureaucratic activities that fall outside the purview of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which specifies the formal process that must be followed to issue regulations. This process includes notifying the public of proposed rulemaking, providing the opportunity for public input and comment before a final rule is published in the Federal Register, and adhering to a 30-day hiatus before the rule becomes effective.

However, those requirements do not apply to “interpretative rules, general statements of policy, or rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice,” or to “the thousands of executive branch and federal agency proclamations and issuances, including guidance documents, memoranda, bulletins, circulars, and letters that carry practical (if not always technically legally) binding regulatory effect,” Crews writes.

And as agencies churn these out, in Crews’s words, even “without Congress actually passing a law or an APA-compliant legislative rule or regulation being issued, the federal government increasingly injects itself into our states, our communities, and our personal lives.” In his 50-page 2015 report on the topic, he focuses on the impact of executive orders, agency guidance documents, and regulatory notices. But the universe of agencies’ nonregulatory actions is even larger, including such things as government research programs or grants to favored researchers that may be tainted by political ideology.

Read the full article at Learn Liberty.