In recent years, President Obama has issued his Fall Unified Agenda right around Thanksgiving, as most of the country is preparing for the holiday season. This year was no different. This past Friday, the 2015 regulatory list was released.
According to Forbes, “the Fall 2015 Agenda reports on 3,297 rules and regulations at the ‘active,’ ‘completed’ and ‘long-term’ stages, many of them holdovers from earlier volumes. This is down from 3,415 last year.
Active (these include pre-rule, proposed and final): 2,244 (there were 2,321 last fall)
Completed: 554 (629 last fall)
Long-term: 500 (465 last fall)
TOTAL: 3,297 (3,415 last fall)
The Agenda appeared pretty much like clockwork every spring and fall, usually April and October, between 1983 and 2011. But recent releases seem timed to draw as little attention as possible, appearing often at holiday weekends:
Fall 2012: The Friday before Christmas (that Monday was Christmas Eve)
Fall 2013: The day before Thanksgiving
Fall 2014: The Friday before Thanksgiving
Fall 2015: The Friday before Thanksgiving
And more:
“The Fall 2015 Agenda reports on 218 ‘economically significant’ rules and regulations at the ‘active,’ ‘completed’ and ‘long-term’ stages. This is up from 200 at this point last year.
Active (pre-rule, proposed, final): 149 (131 last fall)
Completed: 36 (31 last fall)
Long-term: 33 (38 last fall)
TOTAL: 218 (200 last Fall)
The Fall Agenda includes environmental and energy regulations, such as rules for pesticides and coal; these new items come on the heels of other environmental rules earlier this year including smog, fracking, and carbon dioxide emissions. The American Action Forum calculated the financial impact of “regulation in 2015 to a whopping $183 billion — about half from final rules and the other from proposed rules.”
To view the Fall Unified Agenda, go here.
People go into business to do things and make things in this great country of ours — not to comply with government diktats. The unprecedented growth of bureaucratic regulations has been one of the key factors of our lackluster, anemic economic recovery.
The occupier of the WH likes to describe his administration as the “MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION EVER”. If issuing these economy retarding, voluminous new rules and regulations by unelected bureaucrats, is his definition of transparency then I submit the good Harvard professor cut his class when they taught the definition of transparency. It will only get worse in Obama’s final months as a Lame Duck.