Published November 14, 2024
Dry as the desert, and about as easy to interpret as Hammurabi’s Code: That’s how many Americans might describe the Federal Register. It’s an online database chock-full of new rules and regulations issued by the U.S. government, and it publishes every workday, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Attorney Rachel Morrison finds such reading fascinating. You could even call her a “regulations wrangler.” She works for the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on applying Judeo-Christian values to politics. Along with her four-member legal policy team, Morrison is determined to stem the tide of liberal regulations flooding the Register. And they have their work cut out for them.
More than 400 official agencies and subagencies, including heavyweights like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, are involved in the rulemaking, notify-the-public-by-the-Register business. Many of the rules these agencies try to pass involve issues members of Congress won’t touch, in part because their constituents don’t want them to. But the rulemakers don’t answer to voters, giving them dictator-like influence over a wide swath of American life.
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Rachel N. Morrison is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project. An attorney, her legal and policy work focuses on religious liberty, health care rights of conscience, the right to life, nondiscrimination, and civil rights.
