By Clyde Wayne Crews, Competitive Enterprise Institute
The new 2026 Ten Thousand Commandments survey of federal regulation and reform landed at an awkward moment. Election cycles tend to crowd out serious thinking about the structure and limits of government in favor of promises to expand it. But this year is America’s 250th birthday, precisely the sort of moment when Americans ought to reconsider what self-government and independence actually mean.
The traditional regulatory facts and figures are all there in the report, depicting the Trump administration’s downsizing of conventional rules, but also its embrace of interventions that go far beyond conventional rulemaking including industrial policy, subsidies, trade restrictions, and novel forms of administrative activism.
This year’s report closes not with the typical agenda for reforming the administrative state, but for radically rightsizing it as we celebrate 250 years of independence. The question for America 250 is whether that restoration of true independence can overcome the typical election-year disregard for both constitutional limits and the dangers of the administrative state.
If it can, restoring enumerated powers — the constitutional guardrails meant to constrain federal authority — would mark a vital start.
At America 250, especially after the COVID era’s normalization of emergency governance, the challenge we face is no longer merely the over-delegation traditionally emphasized in Ten Thousand Commandments; it is that Congress has abandoned its own limits alongside its excessive outsourcing of lawmaking to agencies.
The result is a sprawling regime of rulemaking and regulatory dark matter that binds the public without meaningful accountability. But America 250 also reminds us that accountability alone cannot solve the problem once government itself exceeds proper constitutional bounds; after all, we voted for the legislators who’ve saddled us with a $40 trillion debt.
Recent years illustrate this reality. Debt-fueled legislative packages — pandemic responses, infrastructure bills, industrial-policy incursions, and subsidy-driven economic planning — have generated entire ecosystems of administrative guidance, mandates, and interventions that persist long after the legislation itself fades from public attention. If Washington is ever to be rightsized, it must become harder not only for agencies to regulate, but for Congress to spend, subsidize, and direct economic life, given how deeply intertwined those impulses have become.
That means doing something Washington rarely does: repeal. Not tweaking. Not streamlining. Ending statutes, shutting down programs, sunsetting agencies, and denying appropriations to entities that never served a legitimate constitutional function in the first place.
Difficult as reducing government may be, oversight of a smaller administrative state is a far more realistic goal than oversight of today’s boundless one. The latter is impossible.
Along the way, Congress must enforce the rules governing rulemaking that already exist. Basic transparency requirements such as the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act’s cost reporting provisions and the Congressional Review Act’s submission mandates are routinely ignored. Meanwhile, rules, guidance documents, and administrative decrees that are never properly disclosed or submitted should be treated as void, something that Trump could do at least temporarily via executive order.
Congress should also abandon the old cost-benefit fantasy under which agencies effectively grade their own rulemaking homework. That framework was always dubious and has become openly politicized in recent years to advance progressive incursions. If executive oversight of the rule-makers through the Office of Management and Budget cannot be trusted consistently across administrations — newsflash: it can’t — then Congress must reclaim approval authority over major rules or establish an independent analytic body actually capable of skepticism toward regulatory expansion.
Finally, none of this works without confronting, excising, and banning regulatory dark matter: those guidance documents and sub-regulatory decrees that increasingly shape private conduct without formal accountability. A centralized disclosure system, uniform identification requirements, and enforceable legal limits on agency guidance are long overdue.
The point of Ten Thousand Commandments has never been merely to measure regulatory accumulation; it has also been intended to underscore that the system producing it is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
Our founder Fred L. Smith Jr. often called himself a despairing optimist. At America 250, let’s hope the mood leads toward optimism.
America’s semi-quincentennial should not become merely another exercise in patriotic pageantry while the machinery of unaccountable administration continues expanding unchecked. Self-government requires more than elections and fireworks. It requires a Congress willing to reclaim legislative responsibility, reassert constitutional boundaries, mind its own business, and allow actual independence rather than simply to celebrate the anniversary of what once was.
Ten Thousand Commandments, 2026 Edition, Competitive Enterprise Institute
“Exposing Loopholes: How Federal Regulatory Oversight Laws Are Being Ignored,” Competitive Enterprise Institute
Wayne Crews is the Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
