The Biden-Harris regulations cost the average family nearly $50,000

Introduction

Government regulation may be the single greatest political barrier to prosperity. The federal executive branch alone issues thousands of new regulations each year that add to the 200,000 pages of federal rules already in place.

With so many components, regulation can be difficult to distill into important trends or even to understand its cumulative costs. This report compares the regulatory records of Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama from a dataset of more than 5,000 federal agency rules.

The main findings are:

• The Biden-Harris administration is poised to add $47,000 in net present value regulatory costs per household from rules finalized during its first term.
  • That's nearly double the costs imposed during President Obama's first term.
  • $47,000 in net present value corresponds to an annual cost of $6,300 for ten years or an annual cost of $3,300 forever.
• Even without counting the speed of Operation Warp, President Trump's first term reduced regulatory costs by $11,000 per household.
• The costs of the new federal rules are more regressive than any of the major monetary taxes used by federal, state and local governments. As a proportion of household income, the costs of the lowest income quintile are seven times greater than those of the highest quintile.
• By lowering wages and raising consumer prices, the rules finalized during the first term of the Biden-Harris administration are expected to reduce the purchasing power of households in the lowest quintile by five percent.
• The largest new regulatory cost comes from the “rule designed to ensure that most new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States will be fully electric or hybrid by 2032” (Davenport 2024). The different Biden-Harris and Obama-Biden emissions rules are expected to raise the price of a new car, SUV or pickup truck by more than $6,000.
• While auto fuel economy and emissions standards are costly, they still account for only a third of total regulatory costs, and even less for the Biden-Harris administration. Collectively, health care, labor, telecommunications, and consumer finance regulations impose costs that exceed those of automobile regulations.