Federal Rulemaking Swells as the Regulatory Bill Keeps Rising
Ten Thousand Commandments 2021 presents a sweeping account of federal regulation, rulemaking volume, and the economic burden imposed on consumers, businesses, and the broader U.S. economy. The annual snapshot frames regulation as a hidden tax: a cost built into daily economic life but not captured in the federal budget the way direct spending and taxation are. That framing runs through the entire report, which argues that the financial impact of federal rules is large, persistent, and still underestimated in public debate.
The central claim is stark. Federal regulation carries a placeholder cost of $2 trillion annually, a figure used for context and comparison because federal agencies do not provide a regularly updated estimate of the aggregate burden. In the report’s telling, that amount rivals the combined total of federal individual and corporate income tax receipts in 2020, and it also sits near the scale of corporate pretax profits. The economic argument is not subtle: when rules are written outside the appropriations process, their cost can spread widely while remaining politically diffuse.
Trump-Era Deregulation Met a Larger Wave of Rulemaking
The report bookends four years of the Trump administration and treats its signature deregulatory effort, “one-in, two-out,” as both a real administrative change and an incomplete reversal of the regulatory state. The claimed FY 2020 out/in ratio reached 3.2 to 1, and 1.3 to 1 when only significant deregulatory actions were counted. Those figures suggest a federal apparatus that did, at times, delete or narrow existing rules faster than it added new ones.
But the same administration also advanced or encouraged intervention in a wide range of sectors. Antitrust, hospital and pharmaceutical price transparency, price controls, speech and social media content regulation, privacy rules, encryption, algorithm oversight, health tracking, vaping, supplements, firearms, trade restrictions, agricultural policy, telecommunications, and financial regulation all appear in the report as areas where deregulatory rhetoric gave way to new controls or support for them. The pattern matters because rulemaking rarely moves in one direction for long. Even a presidency defined in part by deregulation still generated new layers of federal intervention through executive orders, memoranda, and agency action.
A deregulatory slogan can sit beside a growing rulebook.
Final Rules, Federal Register Pages, and the Scale of Administrative Action
Calendar year 2020 ended with 3,353 final rules in the Federal Register, up from 2,964 in 2019. That 2019 figure had been the lowest since recordkeeping began in the 1970s and the only annual count below 3,000. The wider historical context is just as important: in the 1990s and early 2000s, annual rule totals regularly exceeded 4,000. The report also notes that 202 Trump administration rules were added between New Year’s Day and Inauguration Day 2021, a reminder that regulatory action does not stop when a calendar year does.
The Federal Register page count also rebounded sharply. In 2017, Trump’s first year, the register finished at 61,308 pages, the lowest level since 1993 and a 36 percent drop from President Barack Obama’s 95,894 pages, the highest in history. By 2020, the tally had climbed to 86,356 pages, the second-highest total ever. Some of that rise reflects deregulatory activity as well, because rescinding or rewriting rules still consumes pages and administrative capacity. In other words, less regulation in legal effect can still mean more federal prose.
Agencies Issued 19 Rules for Every Law Passed by Congress
One of the report’s sharpest measures is the so-called “Unconstitutionality Index”: the ratio of agency regulations issued to laws enacted by Congress and signed by the president. In 2020, agencies issued 3,353 final rules while Congress enacted only 178 laws, or 19 rules for every law. The average ratio over the previous decade was 28, which the report uses to argue that lawmaking power has drifted far from elected legislators and toward unelected administrators.
This is a structural critique, not a bookkeeping quibble. If agencies are writing far more operative policy than Congress, the balance of power shifts toward the executive branch and its rulemaking machinery. The report presses that point repeatedly, arguing that the cumulative effect is a regulatory system that expands by default and rarely faces the kind of direct accountability attached to statutory law.
The Regulatory Pipeline Still Holds Thousands of Rules
Final rules tell only part of the story. The fall 2020 Unified Agenda listed 3,852 regulatory actions across 69 federal departments, agencies, and commissions at various stages of implementation, including recently completed, active, and long-term items. Of those, 653 were labeled deregulatory under President Trump’s now-defunct Executive Order 13771. The order no longer governs the pipeline under President Biden, and the report treats that reversal as a meaningful shift in administrative posture.
The pipeline also contained 261 economically significant rules, defined by the federal government as having annual economic effects of $100 million or more. Thirty-six of those were classified as deregulatory under the Trump framework. This matters because the formal count of rules understates the reach of the federal regulatory state; the economically significant subset carries outsized consequences for prices, compliance costs, labor markets, and industry behavior.
Since 1993, agencies have issued 111,065 rules. Since the Federal Register began itemizing final rules in 1976, the total has reached 208,155.
Covid-19 Did Not Slow the Larger Administrative Expansion
The report also addresses regulation added and subtracted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Public health emergency measures and emergency-driven agency actions entered an already crowded rulemaking environment, reinforcing the report’s broader argument that crisis often accelerates administrative expansion rather than pausing it. Pandemic-era policy can require rapid federal intervention, yet those emergency responses also add to the accumulated burden the report describes as a hidden tax on the economy.
The deeper policy critique is straightforward: cost-benefit analysis is incomplete, transparency is limited, and congressional accountability is too often replaced by agency discretion. The report argues for stronger review of both new and existing federal rules, along with greater disclosure of their cumulative cost. Its most concrete contribution is not a single regulatory forecast but a data-heavy attempt to measure how much rulemaking the federal government produces, how much it costs, and how far the administrative state has moved beyond the scale of ordinary legislative oversight.