Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words you could not find
--Natasha Bedingfield
Couldn't resist tracking down those Federal Register pages discussed in the last post. Upon further review, I think the source of the historical data cited in the last post is pretty solid. The source is the Law Librarians' Society of Washington DC. LLSWDC has also developed a nice history and background of the Federal Register (first published in 1936).
Annual Federal Registry pages since 1936 appear below.
Changes in the FR requirements make longitudinal comparison challenging:
1947: addition of proposed rules
mid 1960s: addition of more explanatory material
1973: addition of extensive preambles
The current FR includes about 5% blank pages. There are also ~15 pages in each FR issue devoted to title pages, tables of contents, and reader's guides that the LLSWDC does not count (which may account for discrepencies w/ the previously discussed Heritage Foundation study).
It is obvious that the past 11 yrs of Federal Registry pages does not correlate well with the increase in regulatory burden suggested by the Heritage study of 'economically significant regulations.' Because there is more to the contents of the Federal Register than just new documented federal regulations, lack of correlation is not all that surprising. A more precise measure of regulatory burden from the FR pages might be obtained by counting the actual pages that describe new federal regulations, and maybe subtracting the number of pages that describe the removal of existing regs (although I do not know if that is even done in the FR). It would also be useful to identify the fraction of annual FR pages that contain regulatory matter.
Despite the limitations, FR page counts likely do contain some information about regulatory burden, particularly since 1973 (the date of last noteworthy changes to FR requirements). FR page counts have generally been trending higher since 1973 - eyeball suggests about 25-30%. It seems likely that more regs are contributing to the general rise. As such, raw FR page counts like constitutes a coarse measure of regulatory burden.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to view FR pages as a general measure of federal bureaucracy. When the data are viewed in this manner, the trend is clearly up.
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Pursuant to congressional requests, GAO reviewed the cumulative impact of federal regulations on a limited number of businesses, focusing on: (1) what selected businesses and federal agencies believed were the federal regulations that applied to those businesses; (2) what those businesses believed were the cost and other impacts of those regulations; and (3) the regulations those businesses said were most problematic to them and relevant federal agencies' responses to those concerns.
GAO found that: (1) most of the businesses contacted declined to participate in the study; (2) none of the 15 participating companies developed a complete list of regulations that were applicable to them or provided comprehensive data on the cost of regulatory compliance; (3) time and resource constraints and the difficulty of disentangling federal regulatory requirements from those of other jurisdictions and other nonregulatory procedures proved to be major obstacles for the companies; (4) most federal regulatory agencies said that they could not detail which regulations applied to a particular company without a great deal of company-specific information and the expenditure of a substantial amount of resources; (5) measuring the incremental impact of all federal regulations on individual companies is extremely difficult and, therefore, decisionmakers need to be aware of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of studies that attempt to measure total current regulatory costs; (6) many of the 15 participating companies recognized that regulations provide benefits to society and their own businesses, but all of them provided GAO with a varied list of concerns about regulatory costs and the regulatory process; (7) these concerns included perceptions of high compliance costs, unreasonable, unclear, and inflexible demands, excessive paperwork, and a tendency of regulators to focus on deficiencies; (8) the agencies responsible for the regulations the companies viewed as problematic often said that the companies misinterpreted regulatory requirements; (9) the agencies and some congressional members do not always agree on the extent to which problematic regulations are statutorily driven; and (10) the agencies said that they were aware of and were responding to a number of the companies' concerns.
~US Government Accountability Office
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