Some political experts are calling for a revival of a discontinued document called the Regulatory Program of the U.S. Government, which was a sister document to the federal budget until President Clinton killed it upon entering office.

The document's primary contribution was its survey of the annual number of regulations reviewed since 1981 by the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

• When the last edition was published in 1993, it depicted 135 "major" (costing at least $100 million annually) rules.
• The 2,388 rules -- major and minor, proposed and final -- reviewed in 1991 are evidence of the extraordinary scope of federal regulatory activity.
• Another indication is the number of pages in the Federal Register -- 69,684 in 1993.
• Another federal document called the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations -- which describes all proposed and final regulations affecting government and the private sector, under consideration or recently completed -- weighed in with 4,945 such regulations in April 1995.

Something which laid out even basic, easily available facts about the extent of regulatory growth would assist in stalled GOP efforts to deregulate the economy. Reactivating the Regulatory Program document would finally make it obvious that when it comes to regulations, we literally have no idea what we are doing to ourselves.

Source: Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. (Competitive Enterprise Institute), "First Semester Regulatory Report Card," Washington Times, February 13, 1996.

The direct cost of federal environmental, health and safety regulations are probably on the order of $200 billion annually -- about the size of all federal domestic, nondefense discretionary spending. However, the cost of federal regulations is only an estimate, and the benefits to society of those regulations is unknown.

A number of economists believe that the benefit-cost analysis should be used to help make public policy decisions although they caution that quantifying benefits and costs and attaching a dollar figure to them isn't sufficient for making sound decisions and may not always be necessary.

One group of economists recently suggested several principles that should be followed:

• Regulatory agencies should be allowed to consider the economic costs and benefits of proposed regulations -- which federal law now forbids them from doing in many cases.
• Benefit-cost analysis should be required for all major regulatory decisions, but regulations should not be required to meet a strict benefit-cost test.
• However, when the economic costs of a regulation far outweigh its benefits, regulators should be required to justify their decision.
• Agencies should be encouraged to use economic analysis to help set regulatory priorities, and in important cases the analysis should be "peer reviewed" both inside and outside government.
• The benefits and costs of proposed major regulations should be quantified wherever possible, although qualitative pros and cons should also be considered.

Source: Kenneth J. Arrow, et al., "Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation: A Statement of Principles," 1996, American Enterprise Institute, 1150 Seventeenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 862-5800.