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You’d think that the easiest job in government would be enforcing the law on people who want to comply with it—but, as it turns out, it is not that simple.
If you’ve spent much time around the oil-and-gas business, you’ll have heard executives talk about “high compliance” when it comes to environmental and workplace safety rules, by which they basically mean giving regulators everything they ask for plus about 5 percent extra, interpreting vague mandates or rules in a stricter way rather than in a more self-indulgent way. You might think that sounds like companies are working against their own interests at the regulatory margins, but the opposite is the case: Work interruptions and entanglements in regulatory snafus generally cost a hell of a lot more than a little bit of extra scrupulosity where government rules are concerned, and—because real life is not a dystopian Hollywood fantasy—oil and gas producers do not actually want to pollute the groundwater or endanger their employees and neighbors.
But how do you get to high compliance? That might sound like a funny thing to ask a libertarian, but—really, ask a libertarian.
Our Unregulated Regulatory Process
Wayne Crews, my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I am a writer in residence), makes it his business to track “regulatory dark matter.” Every year, Congress passes a couple dozen laws, the regulatory agencies pass a few thousand new rules, and then those same agencies produce some quantity—nobody actually knows how much—of “sub-regulatory” literature: guidance documents, memoranda, circulars, letters, etc. These are not laws, and they are not regulations—and, that being the case, they are not supposed to be binding. But as a practical matter, they end up with a kind of effective quasi-legal standing, with regulators—or possibly prosecutors—pointing to guidance documents in rule-enforcement proceedings when alleging noncompliance. Because federal regulation is so extensive, comprehensive, and vague, there are many occasions for ambiguity. For example, now-repealed Obama-era clean water rules applied to “navigable waters of the United States,” but nobody knew what that meant. The Hudson River? Okay. A cow pond in Florida? Maybe.
“Guidance isn’t supposed to be binding,” Crews says. “But the public is afraid to ignore it.” If you want to know what the law says, you can look it up in the U.S. Code. If you want to read the text of a regulation, it is right there in the Federal Register. But regulatory dark matter is … all over the place, everywhere and nowhere. Crews has been a longtime advocate for something called (I will here refrain from rehearsing my complaint about cutesy legislative acronyms) the GOOD Act—the Guidance Out of Darkness Act—that would, at a minimum, require the federal government to set up a searchable online portal where businesses and other regulated parties that want to comply with the law can get the information they need to comply with the law. Crews would like to see something a little more than that minimum reform, including giving these guidance documents identification numbers (regulations already have them) that would both identify the document itself and give users an idea about what area the document in question covers, which can be non-obvious.
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“Thirty years ago, you wouldn’t think that a financial agency would be regulating climate,” Crews says. But the SEC does that now. “If you’re looking into green-energy regulations, it’s not enough just to go to the EPA,” he says.
Keeping up with that is labor-intensive and, hence, expensive, especially for small- to medium-sized businesses that do not have a hundred lawyers on staff.
“The Federal Register is enough of an abomination, and we hear from small businesses all the time complaining that they can’t keep up with the rules and regulations that keep pouring out of it like chocolate bunnies,” Crews says. “And that’s just ordinary, conventional rules. Guidance documents are even worse.”
How hard is it to keep up with all that? Crews makes a full-time job out of trying to keep on top of this stuff, and he describes his account as “very, very incomprehensive.” The federal government cannot even decide how many federal agencies there are—it depends on whom you ask and how you count—so it isn’t even a matter of drinking out of a firehose, or drinking out of the 15 firehoses that make up the Cabinet—it is a matter of drinking out of some unknown number of firehoses producing an unknown quantity of output.
(So, yeah—we’re hosed.)
Laws are passed by lawmakers who have to face voters every few years. Regulations go through an iterative process that involves public comment. Regulatory dark matter just happens. There is no democratic accountability and none of the protection offered by established universal procedure—which is to say, the federal regulatory process is, at the margin, unregulated. The irony may be amusing to pointy-headed public policy types, but it is less tasty when it is your business and your livelihood that is on the line.
“I hate the term but it’s one of those good-government, commonsense measures,” Crews says. The GOOD Act, which has passed the House and awaits Senate action, would make it a little easier to find relevant documents—or to learn about their existence—but it would not address the underlying issue, which is legislation-by-regulation devolving into regulation-by-guidance.
Most businesses want to play by the rules. It would be nice if there were a way to know what the rules are.
Markets FTW
Soccer fans have been upset about the high ticket prices for the World Cup, which starts next week with matches across North America. So much so that the state attorneys general of New York and New Jersey are investigating FIFA, the sport’s governing body. But Redditors have found a more efficient workaround. From Wired:
What began as an ordinary soccer fan community for finding tickets to the most-expensive-ever World Cup has transformed into a grassroots, AI-powered movement with its own ticketing infrastructure, operating in near real time. Redditors—r/WorldCup2026Tickets has more than 140,000 members—report on surprise ticket drops from FIFA, sharing game availability and price volatility. They post DIY tools that unearth cut-price deals, then exchange tickets on back channels, hurting the back pockets of FIFA and scalpers.
Chart of the Week
Semafor’s Tim McDonnell explains why oil prices haven’t increased more during the Iran war—sanction waivers, Middle Eastern countries using pipelines rather than the Strait of Hormuz, China reducing its oil purchases—and notes, “The question is how long all these buffers can last relative to the pace of ceasefire talks.”
Worth Your Time
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