U.S. Spends $1.75 Trillion to Enforce Federal Regulations

Here is an enraging example of reckless government spending; The United States blows more than the entire economy of most countries to enforce the many rules and regulations of its numerous federal agencies.

Can you say government on steroids? It’s a crazy system in which a bloated government meddles in areas that it shouldn’t. This is done via federal regulations that, of course, require manpower and money to enforce. This costs U.S. taxpayers an astounding $1.75 trillion, an amount larger than all but eight of the world’s economies, according to a U.S. senator who is pushing for reform.  

It gets better; this means that more than 10% of the nation’s economy is spent on trying to satisfy rules issued by Washington bureaucrats, reveals the Senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. The heavy regulatory burden diverts resources from innovation to compliance, discourages business investment, and chills job creation, the lawmaker assures.  

“It is no accident that as Washington adds new regulations, more and more Americans are unemployed and underemployed,” Johnson says. He has called for a congressional investigation to identify ways to reduce these “regulatory burdens.” His suggestions are simple and include common sense. Among them is conducting retrospective reviews of existing regulations to measure results, benefits and costs.

This would allow agencies to revise or eliminate regulations that have been in place for years but aren’t working well or are having adverse consequences. In the past few years federal agencies have also gone on a manic rule-making frenzy, creating dozens of regulations that end up costing a chunk of change to enforce. It’s an insane system that’s only getting worse.

For instance, Senator Johnson reveals that from 2003 to 2010 agencies didn’t bother publishing Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for about 35% of rules with a cost of $100 million or more. The number has nearly doubled since 1998, according to the senator, who stresses that the public has been unscrupulously left out of the process, which is supposed to allow comment/input on proposed regulations.

Under Obama the government has grown immensely and the expansion has inevitably created new rules and regulations. A few years ago the administration sponsored a contest promoting government regulations by offering a cash prize to the person who created the best video explaining the importance of federal rules. Contestants were asked to explain in a short video why rules are important, why the average American should care about federal regulations and how everyone can participate in the rulemaking process.