Without even completing a full term in office, President Joe Biden has already racked up more debt than any other president in the nation’s history, with nearly $7 trillion in deficit spending recorded by the Treasury as of May and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projecting a four-year total of nearly $8 trillion of deficit spending accumulated by the end of this fiscal year. That’s some $2 trillion more than was spent by former President Donald Trump, even including pandemic-era spending.
But beyond the explicit burden of Biden’s spending are the equally unprecedented costs of his regulatory regime. Without passing a single law through Congress, the current White House has cost people trillions in taxpayer tolls and tens of thousands of dollars in annual household costs.
The Biden administration’s failure to heed the easiest rule of sound fiscal policy — first, even before spending a single cent, do no harm — isn’t just costing taxpayers and ordinary consumers. It’s also destroying our overall economic growth.
The good news for whoever succeeds Biden is that, unlike saving Social Security from its impending insolvency or replacing the leviathan of Medicare and Obamacare, undoing Biden’s regulatory policy by executive fiat requires merely the reverse.
For example, consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s new limit on polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS chemicals. Despite previous Pentagon warnings that limiting PFAS in water sources to dramatically lower levels than recommended by the World Health Organization would undermine national security, the Biden administration went forward with finalizing the rule, with the Federal Register publicly estimating the regulation will cost Uncle Sam some $177 million over the next three years.
Environmental regulations on appliances are passed onto consumers even more directly, with the Job Creators Network estimating that Biden’s new efficiency standards will increase the per unit cost of washing machines by $200 and gas furnaces by $494.
Across the 851 final rules issued by the Biden administration as of this April, the American Action Forum estimates that aggregate regulatory costs will amount to $1.63 trillion — orders of magnitude greater than the $308 billion in regulatory costs issued by former President Barack Obama at this point in his first term and $143 billion worth of regulatory costs slashed by Trump by this point in his presidency.
As of last year, economist Casey Mulligan estimated the annual household cost of Biden’s regulations at $10,000, projecting that if “regulatory costs continue to rise at the same rate as they did during the Obama administration, the total costs of Biden’s rulemaking over an eight-year period would almost reach $60,000 per household.” By contrast, the Trump administration reduced regulatory costs by $11,000 per household annually, even excluding the unprecedented deregulation and growth fueled by Operation Warp Speed.
The opportunity costs incurred by overzealous regulations are obvious and all-consuming. Beyond the financial price penalties to taxpayers and consumers, Biden’s limitation of drilling permits, not just for oil and natural gas but also for uranium and minerals such as cobalt, has artificially capped the job growth of the energy sector.
Hence, deregulation should not be understood primarily as a means of deficit reduction — which would be no small feat when the simple cost of paying interest on the national debt is up 42% in one year — but as a tool of economic growth overall. One study by Dutch economists found that reducing administrative costs by 25% results in a 1.4% increase in annual economic growth, while Portuguese economists discerned that legal deregulations can boost total factor productivity, a crucial economic input in a shrinking population, by 0.6%.
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While Biden has benefited from rebound responses to the pandemic keeping gross domestic product growth artificially high, the Federal Reserve’s unilateral war on inflation shows signs of significantly slowing that economic growth as the election looms closer. And while any successor to Biden has a moral mandate to save entitlements from their points of bankruptcy in the next nine years and reduce our deficit from consecutive annual amounts of $2 trillion, getting the regulatory regime out of the way is an easy start to relieve consumers and taxpayers.
And, as was true when it was built up, deconstructing such a bureaucracy does not require a single vote by Congress.