People love to gripe about red tape; but not only is there a method to the madness, there’s a certain madness to the method these days.

Regulations typically go through public notice-and-comment procedures. That’s obscure enough when they appear in a Federal Register of tens of thousands of pages annually that nobody can actually read. Down another layer below that, the assessments of the purported costs and benefits of what agencies plan to inflict are called Regulatory Impact Analyses.

The Biden administration has just proposed a rewrite of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s so-called “Circular A-4” guidance on regulatory impact anaysis preparation (with a too-rapid early May deadline on public comment that ought to be extended).

If you’ve been unsettled by the federal government’s insatiable appetite for growth over the past few years, OMB’s proposed rewrite of regulatory assessment procedures presents a big-time dilemma of such gravitas that “mere” public comments aimed at tweaking the end product cannot resolve. At this advanced stage of federal government consolidation and covetousness, only a work-stoppage by Congress can clear a pathway to preserve regulatory restraint and restore constitutional normalcy when it comes to the Administrative State.

The Draft Circular’s assumptions and biases underscore irreconcilable differences (many longstanding) in what classical liberals and Progressives (who now comprise the bulk of the Administrative State career apparatus and Biden appointments) might be willing to recognize as a regulatory cost or a benefit in the first place when it comes to the introduction of coercion into human affairs.

Politicization and pursuit of grand-scale federal intervention — from climate to digital currency to federal custodianship of able-bodied adults — has converted OIRA from a watchdog against regulatory excess into a promoter of progressive regulatory conceits. (See, for example, the Biden "Modernizing Regulatory Review" Memorandum and Executive Order 14,094, and preambles to recent editions of the twice-yearly "Unified Agenda" of federal regulations).

This last step cannot be first; Congress, to the extent its substantial inquiry, oversight and appropriations authorities allow, should not permit a White House Office of Management and Budget Circular A-4 rewrite to proceed without forcing OMB and its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to address certain elements of decay in regulatory oversight processes that the re-write as presented will not only fail to repair but worsen.

Some of the underlying concerns demonstrating the unworkability of an OMB re-write at this time include:

Congress should recognize that already, even without the Circular A-4 revamp, Biden’s E.O. 14,094 has raised the threshold for the "significant" regulations that ostensibly receive more scrutiny from $100 million annually to $200 million annually. While more of the pursuits noted above would be enabled by A-4, scrutiny would decrease as not only will costs be denied, rules of all sizes would be more readily deemed “net beneficial.”

The White House Circular A-4 rewrite with its rapidly approaching deadline for comments must be seen in context of the progressive legislative transformations of recent years that are increasingly international in scope, and, again, the proclamations of support for this agenda articulated by recent acting OIRA leaders.

The U.S. today ought to be engaging in large-scale regulatory liberalization and shrinkage of bureaucracy and the entire federal enterprise. The opposite is happening.

Congress should — with oversight hearings, inquiries, withholding of funds, and whatever other reasonble and legitimate means it has available — press pause on an already maddening system of regulatory analysis that stands on the precipice of a redesigned aimed at making it still easier to add but not subtract regulation.