Since 1976, federal agencies have issued over 220,000 final regulations. That number comes from Federal Register data compiled by the Competitive Enterprise Institute — the closest thing we have to an official count. This figure represents formal rules that went through notice-and-comment procedures, not informal guidance documents or regulatory “dark matter” that flows from agencies daily. The real regulatory output affecting American businesses and citizens is significantly higher.

The question isn’t just how many regulations exist. It’s what gives unelected bureaucrats the authority to create binding law in the first place. The answer reveals a constitutional system that gradually abandoned its own principles, then recently began correcting course.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mk3blog/p/the-regulatory-