Biden Tells Federal Bureaucrats To Approve Regulations With Benefits That Are ‘Impossible To Quantify’

President Joe Biden has moved swiftly to rev up the regulatory state by weakening oversight and effectively ending a reality-based assessment of the costs and benefits of federal regulation.

It may have gone largely unnoticed amid a flurry of executive orders Biden has signed since taking office less than two weeks ago, but a January 20 memo from the White House to the “heads of executive departments and agencies” outlines a regulatory framework that will empower federal bureaucrats to count unquantifiable “benefits” when weighing the potential impact of new regulations.

Specifically, Biden instructed those officials to revamp their regulatory review processes to “promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.” The memo also states that the new regime “serves as a tool to affirmatively promote regulations.”

Towards that end, Biden’s memo says that his administration will alter the Office of Management and Budget’s rules regarding regulations “to ensure that the review process…fully accounts for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify.”

In other words, if a bureaucrat can conceive of a way that new regulations could advance the goals of racial justice or environmental health, those political aims should be counted as benefits—even if they can’t, well, actually be counted.

That’s a recipe for more regulation, and for a less honest assessment of which rules might be worthwhile and which mer