Elected leaders delegate rulemaking to federal agencies, then seek to influence rulemaking via top-down directives and statutory deadlines. This paper documents an unintended consequence of these control strategies: they reduce regulatory agencies’ ability and incentive to conduct high-quality...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This paper employs the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card scoring system to compare the quality and use of regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) for...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Our previous reviews found that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or...

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. This paper finds that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or regulatory...

A well-established principle of public finance holds that taxes impose costs on society beyond the amount of revenue government collects. Estimates vary depending on the type of tax, but the "marginal excess burden" of federal taxes most likely ranges from 14 to 52 cents per dollar of tax...