GAO: Federal regulation quality is at an all time low

Don't you understand?  It's not about quality or the public good or efficiency, it's about power.   And the worse the regs are written, the more arbitrary discretion and power the statists get to exercise.  They like that.  The WSJ has the sordid, if all too predictable story.

President Obama is leading his regulators in an anvil chorus unlike anything in modern U.S. history. So it is unsurprising but still instructive that independent students of regulation say the quality of the many rules they're putting out seems to be at all-time lows.

Regulatory quality isn't the same as content—though bad rules are usually badly written, as seems to be the case here. Rather, quality refers to a deliberative process: defining the problem; measuring costs, benefits and risks; weighing alternatives, making trade-offs, avoiding duplication; and giving the public opportunity to comment. If all goes well a quality rule will promote or at least not impair "economic growth, innovation, competitiveness and job creation," as Mr. Obama's January 2011 executive order on regulation had it.

It's too boring for the press corps to notice, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the Obamanauts are undermining these basic due diligence practices that have been commonly accepted by whatever party happened to be in power.

Take the rule-making aftershocks of the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial markets, which the Government Accountability Office reviewed in detail in a late November report. The GAO observes that the law "requires or authorizes various federal agencies to issue hundreds of regulations," some discretionary, others not. Among the 32 final rules the banking, futures and securities agencies have issued so far and GAO reviewed, the report dryly notes that "regulators may be missing an opportunity to enhance the rigor and improve the transparency of their analyses."

Poor regulatory quality is a feature, not a bug of 'Chicago Liberalism'.