EPA Winning the Race to Regulate the Economy
29th October 2015
In particular, the EPA is by far the most expensive and active federal agency. The EPA leads the pack in both the number and costs of new regulations. From 2004 – 2014, the EPA passed 32 major rules, costing more than $45 billion annually. The EPA is responsible for more than a third of all regulations and almost half the costs of all the regulations included in the OMB report.
The costs of the EPA from this report should not be taken at face value. The OMB’s report is somewhat deceiving because it only reports a sliver of all federal regulations. The agency effectively picks and chooses which regulations to review because the law only requires the OMB to report on “major rules”. For example, this report only included 13 rules published in 2014, out of the total 3,581 that year.
The costs of these unreported rules add up to billions. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the OMB has left out more than $35 billion of annual costs since 2002 from other important and expensive, yet not “major” regulations. Thus, the true cost of the EPA’s endless regulation is much, much greater than the government reports.