Congress away but regulations keep on coming

Congress comes and goes, but new federal regulations just keep on coming.

Members of Congress have gone home, but bureaucrats are still concocting new regulations to govern American life.

The La Graciosa thistle will get new critical habitat in California’s San Luis Obispo County. So will bighorn sheep in the Sierra Nevada. Cabbage growers in North Carolina, California and Texas could get better crop insurance.

There’s more, lots more: rules revising a quarantine on Florida citrus, rules applying California’s strict aerosol paint standards nationwide, rules on laxatives, on squid fishing, on charter buses.

Welcome to the administrative state. Among politicians, it induces schizophrenia. They write the laws that require rules, then denounce the civil servants who do the work.

“The framers of the Constitution feared one thing above all else,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe declared at the start of the just-concluded 109th Congress, “and that was a tyrannical central government made up of unaccountable federal bureaucrats.”

With the new 110th Congress, Mr. Inhofe will be surrendering the chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Mr. Inhofe’s rhetorical thrust will persist, though, regardless of who is in charge on Capitol Hill.

“I think the bureaucracy has always been a target,” said Scott Nishioki, chief of staff for Rep. Jim Costa, California Democrat.

Mr. Nishioki was speaking shortly after the latest Federal Register, the bureaucracy’s bible, hit the virtual streets. Published online daily, as well as in a decreasing number of hardcover copies, the Federal Register reveals what civil servants actually do.

The Federal Register informed the public when in May the Minnesota Historical Society was returning a 6-inch effigy to its Sioux owners. When wine-making regions were being considered in California’s Livermore Valley and in the Rattlesnake Hills of Washington state’s Yakima County, the information was served up by the Federal Register.

On Monday, every federal agency made public its semi- annual agenda. Spanning more than 880 printed pages.

The agendas are Uncle Sam’s preview reel. They show that the conservative Bush administration has extended the government’s regulatory reach. This year, the White House Office of Management and Budget has formally reviewed 557 federal rules. In 2000, under President Clinton, the White House agency formally reviewed 534 rules.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Bush preferred to bash and not to empower bureaucrats.

“We’re talking about a massive government, folks,” Mr. Bush said in the first 2000 presidential debate, while he was denouncing Democrat Al Gore’s proposals. “We’re talking about adding to or increasing 200 programs, adding 20,000 new bureaucrats.”

Now, one agency — the Interior Department — is listing 304 potential rules on its agenda spanning the fall of 2006 through the spring of 2007.

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