President Obama’s time in office is coming to a end, but he's not leaving before putting his regulatory footprint on nearly every aspect of American life.
The Obama administration just put out 527 pages worth of new rules and regulations Thursday, making the total number of pages for 2016, 81,640. Since the working year isn’t quite over yet, however, there still could be more coming.
The previous record was in 2010 when 81,405 pages were added.
"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," notes Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“This is astonishing and should be of great concern, and intolerable, to policymakers,” he added.
But it’s par for the course for Obama, who holds seven out of the 10 highest Federal Register counts.
President-elect Trump vowed to make cutting regulations a priority during his first weeks in office.
Crews is hoping he makes good on that promise.
“The new president-elect Donald Trump could take a page from PresidentReagan, who brought page counts down from Carter’s 73,258 to as low as. 44,812,” he wrote. “We don’t need a pen and phone, we need a meat axe.”