Ten regulations?
He issued more than that on his last day, or at least in his last month. Some of the regulations may have been desirable even when their costs are considered, but if they were so important you wonder while they all had to wait until just before Bush took office.
You want ten during Clinton's term -
1 - "The Brady law"
2 - Family and Medical Leave Act
3 - The "assault weapons" ban
4 - New regulations expanding on the Community Reinvestment Act
5 - new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules on ergonomics
6 - new rules on medical privacy
7 - "the Clinton administration issued a new dictate that will allow federal procurement officers to blacklist companies that aren’t "good corporate citizens"; federal offices will no longer be allowed to buy goods and services from such firms, even if they offer better prices. In a tip of the hat to organized labor, the new regulation includes outfits with labor complaints filed against them -- not fully adjudicated claims of bad behavior, mind you, just complaints. The urgent need for this rule is perhaps best illustrated by its effective date: January 19th, 2001, just one day before President-elect George W. Bush becomes President George W. Bush."
reason.com
8 - a minimum wage increase
9 - the proclamation creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on 1.7 million acres in Utah.
10 - the American Heritage Rivers Initiative effected by executive order
There where a lot more but you only asked for 10, so I gave you 10 mostly at random. But wasn't as much new regulations, laws and executive orders as more aggressive and expansive enforcement, interpretation, and sub-regulatory guidance. The Clinton administration took each law, reg, or policy and pushed it hard, both in terms of how far they interpret it as reaching and in how hard they are going to push those interpretations when providing guidance, starting investigations, or considering prosecutions and lawsuits.
But I may be wrong on one thing. Not that Clinton didn't greatly expand our regulatory burden but apparently Bush has done a lot more of that that I thought he did. With all the stories of Bush being so against regulation it might be excusable to think that the Bush regulatory burden is light. Well Sarbanes-Oxley is very costly also the total pages in the federal register have reached new records.
OTOH -
"EPI economist Max Sawicky points out (correctly) that I may have been too quick when I noted that the Bush adminstration broke Clinton's 2000 record for new federal regulations. It's certainly true if we're just doing a page count of new rules. But the page count by itself isn't necessarily that important. First, because some of those rules are replacing existing (perhaps more onerous) rules and don't represent any net increase. Second, because knowing the number of regulations doesn't tell you how bad they are: It would not be an improvement to replace the thousands of pages of the Federal Register with one simple sentence saying "all business decisions must be approved by the Supreme Council." And Max points to an OMB report [2.4m PDF] indicating that many new regulations don't impose terribly burdensome costs relative to their benefits."
reason.com
Still even if Bush regulations are less expensive than Clinton's Bush really hasn't been a model of restraint on the regulatory side. He's done better here than in terms of spending but that is a minuscule hurdle to jump over.
Edit - Finally caught up on all my responses here. I don't imagine that will last long... |
