Regulators' budget.

• Author: Brito, Jerry

STATUS: 2007 report now available

Regulations impose social costs on individuals and businesses beyond the direct tax dollars expended to write and enforce them. Not only are there costs associated with compliance, but regulations can restrict opportunities and choices, thus imposing opportunity costs.

Those latter costs are difficult to measure, so efforts to track the change in regulatory activity over time often depend on proxies. One proxy is the size of the Code of Federal Regulations (often measured in number of pages or feet of shelf space occupied by the Code), which provides a sense of the flow of new regulations issued during a given period. The latest edition of Clyde Wayne Crews' regular Ten Thousand Commandments report found that the 2006 Federal Register contained 74,937 pages, a 1.4 percent increase over 2005's 73,870 pages. Those page counts are down from 2004's record-high 75,676 pages. In 2006, according to the report, agencies issued 3,718 final rules, a 6 percent decline from 2005's 3,943 rules.

Crews' figures comport with the findings in the latest edition of the Regulators' Budget series, prepared by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Murray Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The series relies not on number of Federal Register pages or rules, but on the budgets and staff sizes of federal regulatory agencies. The latest edition of the Regulators' Budget, titled "Growth in Regulation Slows: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2007 and 2008," finds that President Bush's proposed 2008 Budget calls for $46.6 billion in expenditures on regulatory activities for fiscal year 2008, a...