Midnight Regulations: an update

摘要: The ability of a lame-duck president to achieve anything in the last months of his presidency is “like a balloon with a slow leak that shrinks with each passing week until it hits the ground.” 1 Nonetheless in his last days in office, President Bill Clinton managed to rush through an unprecedented number of “midnight regulations,” ranging from tightened water quality rules to increased mandatory minimum energy efficiency standards for air conditioning, heat pumps, and washing machines.Virtually every modern president has made some regulatory change in the final days of their administrations, but it was not until the regulatory outburst of President Jimmy Carter’s final days that the term “midnight regulation” was coined. At the time, the Carter administration set the record for number of pages printed in the Federal Register during the midnight period—the three months between Election Day and Inauguration Day—with 24,531 pages. 2 Clinton’s unprecedented passage of midnight regulations in late 2000 sparked a renewed interest in the use of presidential power in the period between an election and a new administration. During its last three months in office, the Clinton administration published more than 26,542 pages in the Federal Register. 3 According to Susan Dudley, the regulatory activity in Clinton's post-election quarter represented a 51 percent increase over the average number of pages published during the same quarter of the previous three years of Clinton's second term. 4 This sudden outburst of regulatory activity is not just a characteristic of Democratic administrations. President George HW Bush’s administration had instituted a …