Congress passes a handful of laws each year. But government agencies pass several thousands of regulations each year, which have the force of law. Democracies elect their lawmakers and law enforcers, but no one elects the bureaucrats, who are now increasingly performing the functions of government and are running the country.
This is a global phenomenon and is one of the major reasons Great Britain voted to exit the all-bureaucratic European Union.
A practical problem of this arrangement is that agencies are issuing so many dictates that the public doesn’t even know what they are–until they suddenly find themselves in legal trouble for breaking them.
In fact, no one even knows how many federal agencies there are! A congressional hearing disclosed that one official tally lists 60 and another lists 115, noting that there “is no authoritative list of government agencies.”
From Good reason to feel agencies run amok | News OK:
IT’S an apparent contradiction. Gridlock means relatively little gets done in Congress, yet the size of government continues to grow. How can both occur simultaneously?
Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, provides an answer: Because federal agencies are allowed to effectively write countless new laws and regulations.
Crews recently testified on federal agencies’ use of “guidance” to make de facto law. The testimony came at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management, chaired by Sen. James Lankford,
R-Oklahoma City.
Crews’ comments deserve broader attention. As he notes, it is almost impossible for citizens to know all the rules they are supposed to follow because few even know many rules exist. For that matter, officials can’t even agree on how many federal agencies exist.
Crews noted the twice-annual Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions listed 60 agencies in its Spring 2015 edition. But the Administrative Conference of the United States lists 115 agencies. And the latter publication notes there “is no authoritative list of government agencies.”
“If nobody knows how many agencies exist by whose decrees we must abide, that means we do not know how many people work for the government (let alone contractors making a living from taxpayers) nor how many rules there really are,” Crews said in his written remarks. “But even when we isolate a given, knowable agency, it may be hard to tell exactly what is and is not a rule. That, plus the growing concern that issuing a rule may not even be necessary to achieve bureaucratic ends, call out for congressional response.”
Congress may pass just a few dozen laws each year. But federal agencies issue several thousand associated rules and regulations.
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