In just the last year, the regulatory apparatus of the federal government has endured a range of healthy threats and corrections. Approximately 1,579 regulatory actions have been withdrawn or delayed, according to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and that wave is set to continue. “Agencies plan to finalize three deregulatory actions for every new regulatory action” this fiscal year, a recent report noted.
“We’re here today for one single reason,” said President Trump said last December, holding a pair of scissors aside a symbolic mountain of papers: “to cut the red tape of regulation.”
It’s a welcome development for many businesses, who have struggled amid a growing string of onerous and arbitrary rules and measures. But it’s also a movement that could help restore a bit of hope for republican democracy—taking power away from an unelected, unaccountable regulatory regime and shifting it back to Congress and its constitutions.
As the Hoover Institution’s Adam J. White explains in a recent PolicyEd video, the administrative state has, up until now, largely shielded itself from the eyes and ears of the people it’s supposed to serve:
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