Much talk has been made of the sequester and the rhetoric falls along the usual political party lines. But numbers can’t lie (unless they are in vague statements made by government media representatives).
We’ve seen claims about parks with limited hours and White House tours being cut – those are things journalists can report on easily and exhibit some faux outrage – but those White House calligraphers with six-figure incomes didn’t have their pay reduced at all and it got little attention.
Very few in the government faced the sequester, unless their jobs could annoy people and get media coverage. And if you work in one of the byzantine regulatory organizations, not only was your budget not hit by the sequester, it went up – and you got to hire more people.
An annual report is published by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis and the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center lays it all out there. Despite the supposed sequester, regulatory agencies got a 0.9 percent increase this year, to $56.4 billion and that will go up to $59.4 billion in 2014 when even more new regulations go into effect.
Regulation is a ‘priority’ so that is on the President’s special list of exemptions. How scary huge is this industry? The numbers below only cover agencies whose regulations primarily affect private sector activities – and excludes costs associated with regulations that govern taxation, entitlement, procurement, subsidy, and credit functions. So these are without the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Defense, although they all issue regulations.
The Food and Drug Administration $600 million more to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 – which the president postponed until after the election due to all its new restrictions, regulations and overt favoritism. Customs and Border Protection got $115 million this year and is getting $542 million more next year. Why? It’s unclear, since we have been told immigration reform will end illegal immigration.
And while the rest of the economy has been mired in fiscal quicksand, federal unemployment has remained low, around 3%. Imagine what employment would look like if federal and state unions didn’t have so many people. And it will go higher. Federal regulatory agencies (with the exclusions above) alone employed 282,070 people this year, a 1.6 percent increase over last year, and they will get an additional 0.7 percent next year. 284,085 people whose jobs are to enforce the laws lobbyists have given to companies that are then blamed for unemployment and outsourcing jobs.
Download the report: Sequester’s Impact on Regulatory Agencies Modest