This letter to the editor of the New York Times is posted on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Facebook page:
May 14, 2010
Editor, The New York Times 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018
To the Editor:
Your May 12 article “With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion” (page A15) asserts that the Bush administration had a “deregulatory agenda.” If that is true, then President Bush failed miserably in executing it.
His administration added 31,634 new regulations to the books, and repealed hardly any. The cost of complying with federal regulations exceeded $1 trillion for the first time on Bush’s watch. 587,321 new pages were added to Federal Register during the Bush years.*
Even the regulation-intensive Obama administration is passing new regulations at a pace nearly ten percent slower than President Bush.
Contrary to the article, the Bush administration was the best friend regulators have had in a generation or more.
Ryan Young
Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC