Regulations written by the Biden administration and those before it cost small businesses about $51,000 per employee, a gigantic cost that starves many firms of investments and raises the prices on consumer goods, according to an end-of-year analysis of the administrative state.
Using data from outfits that track red tape, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the overall $3 trillion impact from rules and regulations has been jacked higher by the Biden administration’s social justice demands and requirements for union labor.
“The choices made 100 years ago in creating and erecting the administrative state have generated costs unacknowledged today. Unwise interventions today will do the same to our descendants, lowering their standards of living, lessening opportunities, harming American prosperity,” said Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Crews, who has urged the administration and Congress to expand Trump era demands to be more transparent on regulations, said the costs of agencies turning White House executive orders into rules have reached new highs.
What’s more, the Biden administration has resumed the Obama administration’s reliance on red tape to push its social and environmental agenda through when it can’t win support in Congress. Crews, for example, counts the pages in the Federal Register where regulations are published and determined that Biden’s tally this year is just shy of Obama’s highest, at over 90,000.
The Top-20 all time high Federal Register counts, showing Biden's 90,084 today. @ceidotorg pic.twitter.com/DaGaq9rliB
— Clyde Wayne Crews Jr (@wayne_crews) December 28, 2023
In estimating costs, Crews used a recently released report from the National Association of Manufacturers that put the cost of regulations on Main Street at $3.07 trillion. NAM said, “The total cost of federal regulations, estimated at more than $3 trillion dollars, outpaced the economic output of the entire manufacturing sector.”
Crews, writing in Forbes and citing the report, said that regulations hit small businesses the most, at $51,000.
It also hits “the typical U.S. firm is almost $13,000. This cost of federal regulation in the typical U.S. firm equals 19% of payroll expenditures,” said NAM.