A database to track the administrative state like never before
As long as people have governed each other, leaders have passed the mantle of responsibility to others. As far back as 1689, John Locke wrote, “The legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.”
In other words, legislatures—not bureaucrats—should make laws. But that’s been much more of an ideal than a reality in the U.S. federal government, as Congress has a long history of delegating significant legislative power to federal agencies.
Sometimes, Congress’ delegations are specific, such as when they issue explicit statutory directives for agencies to take precise regulatory action. But other times, the authorizations are general or broad grants of rulemaking authority without specificity. When agencies take actions based on such broad delegations of power, rulemaking starts to resemble lawmaking.
And what’s the result? A Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) that, as of late 2023, spanned more than 190,000 pages across 245 volumes containing nearly 1.1 million regulatory restrictions (words like “shall,” “must,” and “prohibited”). Just since 1980, the number of pages has grown by more than 86 percent. Nobody can wrap their heads around that volume of information—not regulators, not members of Congress, and, more importantly, not the ordinary Americans subject to those restrictions.
A new project by Pacific Legal Foundation aims to bring the entire CFR to the fingertips of policymakers, researchers, and citizens. The AI-powered Nondelegation Project connects the statutory authorities granted by Congress with the rules that agencies promulgate based on those delegations, categorizing each as “specific” or “general.” This project brings what is an otherwise-incomprehensible behemoth of an administrative state to one user-friendly site, allowing users (researchers interested in regulations, litigators focused on nondelegation priorities, members of Congress intent on finding ways to rein in the bureaucracy) to track congressional and regulatory activity and easily identify potentially problematic delegations to agencies.
The project has found that of the more than 56,000 delegations captured throughout the CFR, 37 percent are classified as general grants of power. The most-cited general delegation in the CFR (cited almost 4,000 times) is the section that regulates the Department of the Treasury.
The two agencies with the most delegations classified as general are the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (3,309) and the Environmental Protection Agency (2,752). The latter also boasts the most regulatory restrictions throughout the entire CFR, with 110,869 individual restrictions—75,000 more than the next agency.
The Department of Justice and NASA have the highest percentage of broad authorizations from Congress (among agencies with at least 100 in total). Roughly two-thirds of these agencies’ respective congressional delegations are general, unspecific grants of rulemaking authority. On the flip side, the Farm Credit Administration and TSA have the lowest percentage of broad delegations from Congress. More than four out of five delegations to these agencies, in fact, are specific directives for them to take precise action.
There’s much discussion about regulatory reform, from the Trump administration and DOGE to think tanks and the growing abundance movement. But that conversation can go only so far if the people who make the important decisions and highlight specific regulatory issues don’t even know where to begin looking.
The CFR has become the kind of metastasizing law that James Madison warned “poisons the blessings of liberty itself.” Those who set up our limited government would be shocked by the regulatory burden on Americans today, which current economic literature shows to exceed $4 trillion annually. With recent Supreme Court decisions limiting administrative authority (West Virginia v. EPA, SEC v. Jarkesy, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) and executive actions like President Trump’s memo directing the repeal of unlawful regulations, now is as good a time as any to engage in real, substantive regulatory reform to reduce this burden.
The Nondelegation Project offers specific targets for regulatory reform, whether that’s in the form of particular parts of the CFR based on broad grants of authority, the broad grants themselves, or agencies that are the biggest beneficiaries of Congress’ profligacy. This is necessary to strengthen individual liberty and return to a constitutional government, and our Nondelegation Project is the roadmap to get it done.
