In their 2024 book Over Ruled, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze document the dramatic expansion of federal laws. This expansion stems not just from enactments by Congress and decisions of courts, but also from the numerous federal agencies through their arsenal of rules and regulations, informal public guidance and enforcement actions. Federal statutes used to fit in one volume, but now surpass 54 volumes and 60,000 pages. Federal agency rules ran 16 pages in 1936, but now surpass 200 volumes and 188,000 pages. No one knows for sure how many agency regulations have criminal penalties, but one estimate is that the total surpasses 300,000. And, more worrisome, federal agencies sometimes “don’t just write and enforce legally binding rules,” but also “act as prosecutor and judge, too.”
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