Freedom Line Blog

From Fox News:

By law, each April and October, federal agencies are required to release an accounting of proposed regulations that will have an economically significant impact. That didn’t happen in 2012.

Instead, the Obama administration didn’t release its 2012 regulatory agenda until on the Friday before Christmas.

“The fact that this snuck in after the election, during the holiday season when people were otherwise occupied with their families, is not surprising,” said John Malcolm, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Since the Dec. 21 release, legal experts and analysts have been pouring through the tens of thousands of pages in order to determine their impact. According to an initial estimate by the American Action Forum, which notes that some entries are missing key fiscal data, the cost of implementing the agenda would top $123 billion. Completing the paperwork could require more than 13 million man-hours.

“It’s massive,” former Deputy Attorney General Tom Dupree said. “There’s no way any human being can sit down and read this whole thing from front to back.”

In a society that prizes both limited government and the rule of law, it’s reasonable to expect regulation to be simple, transparent, and cost-conscious. This new wave of dictates fails on all three counts. And what’s most singularly galling about the whole thing is that there is no one to hold directly accountable. No one who crafted any of these rules ever stood for office or received a single vote.

As ever, when it comes to the administrative state, the delegation of power is the abdication of liberty.