President Biden’s administration has filled up the Federal Register with more pages of regulations than any other president in history, breaking President Barack Obama’s record.
As of last week, on Dec. 3, the Biden administration set a new federal record for the most Federal Register pages filled in a single year – 96,088. The number puts the administration on pace to fill more than 100,000 pages by the end of its term.
The record was previously held by Obama, who, in the final year of his second term, filled 95,894 pages.
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The Federal Register, which is published by the National Archives and Records Administration and overseen by the Office of the Federal Register, is a daily publication of new and amended federal regulations.
“Federal Register page counts are a highly imperfect gauge of regulatory burden. Biden’s milestone, though, still underscores the expanding scope of federal intervention,” said Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., fellow at the Washington-based nonprofit the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The record-setting 2024 Federal Register provides a stark reminder of the scale of the regulatory state, and it ain’t even done yet.”
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During the final year of President-elect Trump’s first term in office, the Federal Register saw its fourth-largest number of pages filled. However, Crews said that number was likely inflated by efforts to eliminate rules that require agencies to issue new ones, as well as emergency COVID-19 pandemic measures. Meanwhile, during Trump’s first year in office, 2017, there were fewer pages added to the Federal Register than anyone since Bill Clinton in 1993, Crews pointed out.
Shortly after entering the Oval Office in 2017, Trump issued Executive Order 13771, which initiated a new federal rulemaking process requiring that for every single regulation added by the Trump administration, two must be taken away. The result of this was net cost savings throughout Trump’s first term, Crews said.
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President Trump holds gold scissors to symbolically cut government red tape during an event at the White House on Dec. 14, 2017. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)