Even Biden’s Own People Are Betting That Trump Wins

This headline says much more than the Politico editors intended: “Federal agencies scramble to finish Biden’s rules — and protect his legacy from Trump.”

The story is about how, if regulators can get rules finalized by April, it won’t be so easy for Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to overturn them, as they did with the regulations Barack Obama imposed just before leaving office.

Federal law – the 1996 Congressional Review Act, to be specific – lets Congress vote to overturn regulations within “60 congressional session days” of when they are finalized. After that, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of them.

“The scramble to finish the regulations is crucial to determining how much of Biden’s ambitious legacy may survive past the November election,” Politico reports.

But a president running for reelection to make this sort of mad dash to the regulatory finish line isn’t normal.

When George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004, the number pages of “final rules” published was lower than the year before, according to data collected each year by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ditto with Obama, whose regulators published 2,000 fewer pages of “final rules” in the Federal Register in 2012 than the year before. “In 2012, the number of new regulations has plummeted in a year in which the president’s regulatory policies have emerged as a major campaign theme,” the National Journal observed at the time.

Both Bush and Obama won reelection by wide margins.

So why are Biden’ people in a rush? Only one reason: They’re betting Biden isn’t going to be president in 2025.

White House officials also shoved a huge number of new rules across the finish line in 2020 at a time when Donald Trump was trailing badly in the polls. According to CEI’s annual “10,000 Commandments” report, the page count for final rules in Trump’s last year jumped 59%. To be sure, many of those were deregulations. (In order to remove a previous regulation, regulators have to go through the costly and cumbersome process of writing an entirely new regulation to erase the old one.) But it shows that Trump officials were also worried about his chances in 2020.

Biden’s last-minute effort to get massively expensive rules through the pipeline is yet another reason to pray that he loses in November. When left-wing groups say they are feeling “anxious excitement” over the pile of regulations Biden has in the works, as Environment America’s Lisa Frank, told Politico, you know the country is headed for trouble.

Those rules – to force electric cars on the market, hamstring energy development, regulate home appliances out of existence – would have a devastating effect on the economy, no matter who is president. And if they take effect in time to beat the Congressional Review Act deadline, getting rid of them will be extraordinarily difficult.

Which is also why it’s also critical that the next conservative administration make it a top priority to dismantle the administrative state – which over the past several decades has imposed rules that cost almost $2 trillion in annual compliance costs.

How is it that Biden can handicap the next administration simply by beating the clock on new regulations? Shouldn’t the next president or the next Congress – not unelected bureaucrats – have a say in what the government is forcing on American businesses and consumers?

We hope all those Biden regulators are right about Joe’s chances in November. Because if he’s able to “secure his legacy,” it will be bad news for America.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board