Reminding Washington that he is still in control of the regulatory arm of the federal government, Barack Obama set a record by handing down a whopping 527 pages on Thursday, bringing his total to the highest amount of regulations in American history.
Obama shattered his old record with the November 17 release, according to a report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Thursday’s release brought Obama’s 2016 total to 81,640 pages of regulations. In 2010, Obama executed 81,405 pages of regulations for the year. Thus far in 2016 he has already surpassed that by 235 pages.
“No one knows what the future holds, but at a pace of well over 1,000 pages weekly, the Federal Register could easily top 90,000 pages this year. The simple algebra says that at the current pace we’ll add 11,190 pages over the next 44 days, to end 2016 at around 92,830 pages,” CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews said in its report.
The Obama years represent seven of the ten highest tallies for regulations, with President George W. Bush taking the other three spots. Indeed, the top four numbers of regulations all belong to Obama.
“The new president-elect Donald Trump could take a page from President Reagan, who brought page counts down from Carter’s 73,258 to as low as 44,812,” CEI noted.
“We don’t need a pen and phone, we need a meat axe,” Crews joked.
Obama claimed he would cut regulations when he first ran for the White House in 2007, and in 2012 he announced “new steps to cut red tape and eliminate regulations.”
Obama was still claiming he intended to cut regulations as late as his most recent State of the Union speech, when he insisted, “I think there are outdated regulations that need to be changed. There is red tape that needs to be cut.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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