Flying blind in a red-tape blizzard: how George W. Bush became the regulator in chief.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan
• Position: Columns

ATTENTION, FANS OF smaller government: Ever helpful, this correspondent has found yet another reason to be unhappy with President Bush. He appears to be the biggest regulator since the Nixon-Ford years.

In June the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis released their latest annum report on regulation in Washington. (The study, by Jerry Brito and Melinda Warren, is available at mercatus.org.) These numbers need to be handled with caution. They measure how much money the government's departments and agencies are spending to regulate and how many people they are employing to do it. They give, at best, a rough indication of how quickly the regulatory wheels are turning.

The left panel of the chart (next page) tells the story. (The percentage calculations are mine, based on data supplied by the Weidenbaum Center.) From 200l through 2006, Bush has increased inflation-adjusted regulatory spending by 6.5 percent a year and increased regulatory staffing by 6.3 percent. You have to go back before President Carter to find a president who has done as much regulatory spending and hiring as Bush. (Adding the projected figures for 2007 does not substantially change the picture.)

A cruder, but still suggestive, measure of regulatory activity is the annum page count in the Federal Register, where the government publishes proposed and final regulations. Burdensome regulations may be concise, of course, and deregulation can run to hundreds of pages. Still, if the page count moves in the same direction as regulatory spending and staffing, that deepens suspicion that something is really happening. Sure enough, as the right panel of the chart shows, Bush outstrips Carter, the previous record-holder for average annual Register pages.

A new report by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, estimates that federal regulation now costs the economy more than $1.1 trillion a year. Crews also notes one data series that points in a contrary direction. The raw number of final rules published in the Federal Register is down since the 1990s; indeed, it has been declining since the 1970s. "But that doesn't tell you about the costs of those rules," Crews cautions.

Nor does it tell you about the benefits. Asked about the rising indicators of red tape, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) points to its recent draft report to Congress on the costs and benefits of...