After four years of President Donald Trump trying to rein in the federal government, it is back to growing fast as ever under President Joe Biden. In addition to the multi-trillion dollar spending bills Biden has championed and signed, his administration is rapidly expanding the regulatory state. "Each one of these (regulations) is basically a mini-law," says Kevin Kosar, author and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "And in the first four months of the Biden administration, his people proposed another 800 regulations."
Among the more notable regulations issued under Team Biden is one that governs how the Department of Education awards grants to schools for teaching American history. "What they intend to do is change the decision-making criteria, to focus on applications from schools that want to teach 'woke' curricula, rather than standard American history and civics," says Kosar.
In a new piece for the American Spectator, Kosar details how Biden is re-regulating where Trump was de-regulating. It started on Biden's first day in office, when he signed an order reversing Trump's mandate that two regulations be cut for every new one proposed by federal agencies.
Even more insidious is what Kosar calls "regulatory dark matter." "This is where agencies skip the standard process and issue documents that give interpretation of the rules and directions on how to follow them," he says. "These do not go through the public comment period, agencies can simply do them...and they also have the effect of law."
The one aspect of Trump's presidency Biden can't undo is the 234 judges Trump appointed to the federal bench. Some of those judges have already blocked Biden policies, and they could do the same to these new regulations. "There are some individual regulations that are going to end up in the court system, and could very well be shot down," says Kosar. "The Obama administration experienced this numerous times when it tried to skip Congress...and I would anticipate we're going to see more of that."
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