As my colleague Ryan Young noted on X, this week’s Federal Register is a bumper edition of new rules and regulations, almost triple the normal pace.

This is indeed a sign that the deadline for Congressional Review Act (CRA) scrutiny by the next Congress is drawing near. Regulators want to make sure their rules are going to be reviewed by this Congress and with a president who will veto any successful CRA efforts to strike down the rule.

However, it is also notable that the rules coming out this week are truly significant in their size and sweeping nature. And many of them are being proposed without clear authority for the agency to do so. Here are just some of them:

This is also the administrative state kicking the hive of what Michael Brendan Dougherty called here “rule by swarm.” Private enterprises will have to adapt to these rules and their likely successors, and so will the agents who impose harms on the rest of us who just want to get on with our lives.

This isn’t going to let up. The Federal Register is on course for its first 100,000-page year.