Biden’s Record-Breaking Regulatory Run
The fourth and final year of the Biden administration included record levels of federal regulations—including more than a dozen new rules finalized in the last hours before Inauguration Day.
Former President Joe Biden’s final year in office “set a blistering pace,” writes Clyde Wayne Crews, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), in a piece for Forbes. During 2024, the Biden administration created 3,248 new rules, by Crews’ count, and finished out the year by publishing 107,262 pages in the Federal Register, the weekly publication that lists all new rules, proposed rules, and other public notices.
The number of pages in the Federal Register is a blunt, imperfect way to track the activities of the administrative state. Still, it offers a useful view of historical regulatory trends, and Biden’s output in 2024 is the highest total ever recorded.
But the Biden administration didn’t stop when the new year hit. In the first three weeks of 2025, Crews notes in a blog post for CEI, the outgoing administration issued 243 new rules across 7,641 pages of the Federal Register. That includes 15 final rules and 23 proposed rules that weren’t published until Tuesday, January 21—the day afte
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