Among the many areas where the Republican Congress's actions have fallen short of its promises is deregulation. In the Contract With America, Republicans promised to rein-in government regulators and lift the regulatory burden on American businesses. However, a new study shows that far from being downsized, the major regulatory agencies have never had bigger budgets or larger staffs. In fact, a Republican Congress appropriated one of the biggest increases ever for the Environmental Protection Agency, the worst of all regulatory agencies.

The study from the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis carefully examines the federal government's regulatory spending. It reports that federal regulatory agencies saw one of their biggest increases ever in fiscal year 1997. Real, inflation-adjusted spending by all federal regulatory agencies rose 9.2 percent and the number of employees went up by 1,015.

• The biggest increase was received by EPA, which now gets nearly a third of all federal regulatory outlays.

• In 1997, it got an increase in its budget of $1.3 billion, a rise of 32 percent after inflation.

• This increase allowed EPA to hire an additional 665 regulators, raising the total to 17,693. It is expected to add a further 330 regulatory staff in 1998.

Another regulatory agency seeing a healthy increase is the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act. In real terms, the Fish and Wildlife Service saw its budget rise by more than 11 percent in 1997 and it added 162 regulators to its staff. It will add another 139 in 1998.

According to the CSAB study, businesses spend $20 to comply with federal regulations for every $1 the government spends. And the burden on small businesses tends to be greater than for large businesses, which have a larger output over which to spread the cost. For this reason, one of the first bills passed by the Republican Congress in 1995 was the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act. This legislation requires regulatory agencies to submit proposed regulations to Congress, which may disapprove of them by a joint resolution. However, there has yet to be a single resolution of disapproval passed by either the House or the Senate to date.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Republican Congress has been a willing handmaiden to Bill Clinton in the re-regulation of the American economy. This follows the almost complete reversal of Ronald Reagan's deregulatory efforts by George Bush, who hired more than 21,000 additional regulators in just four years, and increased real spending on regulatory activities by more than 21 percent. Apparently, the Republican Party is no longer the party of deregulation.