| Chart of the Day |
| SEPTEMBER 24, 2026 |
GOVERNMENT • REGULATION |
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| In 2024, Washington Added 106,109 Pages to the Federal Rulebook. The Most Ever. |
| That’s 290 new pages of regulations every single day, including weekends. |
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| Total pages published in the Federal Register each year, the daily record of all proposed and final federal rules. |
| Source: National Archives, Office of the Federal Register, 2026 |
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| You probably didn’t read 106,109 pages of anything last year. Nobody did. But in 2024, federal agencies published exactly that many pages in the Federal Register... the daily record of every rule coming out of Washington. That’s 290 pages a day. Including weekends. |
| Most folks assume regulations grow slowly. A few pages here, a few there. Boring stuff nobody notices. And that’s exactly how it works... which is the problem. In 1970, the entire Federal Register was 20,036 pages for the whole year. By 1980, it had more than quadrupled. By 2024, it was five times the 1970 level. Not because anyone voted for more rules. Just because the machine keeps running. |
| Now look at that last bar. In 2025, the page count fell to 61,584. That’s a 42% drop in a single year... the sharpest single-year decline on record. The “10-for-1” executive order, kill ten old rules for every new one, plus the DOGE-driven workforce cuts, hit the regulatory pipeline like a wrench in the gears. |
| And it’s showing up where it counts. The S&P Global Manufacturing PMI just printed 57.0 for September... the highest reading in over two years. Small-business owners have been saying for decades that paperwork costs them more than taxes. When you pull 44,000 pages of rules out of the pipeline in one year, people start building things again. |
| None of this means every regulation was bad. Some of those pages kept your water clean. But when the rulebook grows 430% in 54 years and nobody ever goes back to trim the dead weight, the cost lands on the guy running a plumbing company or trying to add a room to his house. |
