Biden-Harris Regulations Cost the Average Family Almost $50,000

Introduction

Government regulation may be the single greatest policy 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 comprehend its cumulative costs. This report compares the regulatory records of Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama based on a dataset of more than 5,000 federal agency rules.

The main findings are:

• The Biden-Harris administration is on pace to add $47,000 in net present value regulatory costs per household from rules finalized during its first term.
  • This is almost twice 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 Operation Warp speed, President Trump’s first term reduced regulatory costs by $11,000 per household.
• The costs of new federal rules are more regressive than any of the major monetary taxes used by federal, state, and local governments. As a share of household income, the costs for the lowest incomequintile are seven times what they are for the top quintile.
• By reducing wages and increasing consumer prices, the rules finalized during the first term of the Biden-Harris administration are expected to reduce the purchasing power of the lowest-quintile households by five percent.
• The single greatest new regulatory cost comes from the “rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032” (Davenport 2024). The various Biden-Harris and Obama-Biden emissions rules are expected to increase the price of a new car, SUV or pickup by more than $6,000.
• While the automobile fuel economy and emissions standards are costly, they still account for only a third of the total regulatory costs, and even less for the Biden-Harris administration. Collectively, health, labor, telecommunications, and consumer finance regulations impose costs that exceed those of automobile regulations.