This piece originally appeared in The Hill.
It’s now effectively illegal to manufacture or sell incandescent light bulbs in the United States, thanks to a Biden administration regulation setting minimum efficiency standards that went into effect in August. The change is just one illuminating example of how government regulations dictate how Americans live. PVC pipes could be next.
But more rules are coming, whether the American people or their representatives in Congress like it or not. Under new White House guidance, federal agencies will use a new framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of planned federal regulations. The new approach will place greater weight on the future benefits of regulations, including mitigating climate change, and the distributional effects of regulation, such as equity.
This may sound like a paperwork exercise for bureaucrats and economists, but the implications should be salient for American households already struggling to pay the bills. “The simplest way to sum up their effects is generationally,” explained the New York Times’s Jim Tankersley; “[the new cost-benefit rules] would enable the government to impose more costly regulations for Americans today, in hopes of saving money and lives in the future.” As one regulatory expert put it, the new approach “appears to depart from the goal of offering decisionmakers a transparent presentation of how efficient and effective different options are, and instead seems to bend the analytical methods to point to desired outcomes.”
