All regulations should be made by Congress. Bureaucrats making what ends up being in effect laws with penalties is not representative government.
There is too many regulations anyway, and bureaucrats love to be mini tin pot dictators. Many of them couldn’t be trusted to manage a Diary Queen much less regulate an industry.
There is also too many laws. The average American commits 3 felonies a day. Any rogue prosecutor could come after any one of us with one of those laws that should never have been made to begin with. Once in a while some do get that treatment with devastating consequences.
There will always be bureaucrats. You simply can’t expect Congress to have the knowledge, expertise, or time to deal with all of the issues that the feds oversee.
If you abolished all of the departments tomorrow, you’d see congressional staffs burgeon by the tens of thousands by Tuesday.
The only thing you would accomplish is shifting the bureaucracy from one branch to another.
These are hazardous material transportation regs, which contain hundreds of pages of detailed instructions for handling, packaging, marking, etc. of a wide range of hazardous materials.
Do you really think that Congress has the expertise not only to deal with this degree of highly technical detail, but to work with counterparts in other countries to ensure safe transportation of hazardous materials worldwide? As it stands, Congress directs DOT/PHMSA to develop and maintain these regulations, because that’s where the expertise is. Lots of regs are very similar in nature.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, Congress directs agencies to develop regulations to flesh out the often very general provisions in statute. One of the first required provisions in any regulation is the “Authority”, which exactly spells out the authority in the law for every regulation. Agencies don’t make regs that haven’t been explicitly authorized by Congress.
Incidentally, regs can’t impose any penalties unless the Congress has included specific authority for such penalties. Agencies don’t just make them up.
There are plenty of people with just that experience, not to mention public review and comment on all proposed regulations where the regulated public can weigh in on whether they make sense or not.
You have to remember that you’re talking to the same people that think if somebody is great at business (or whatever else) then they must be great at everything. Now that Tom Brady has retired he can just grab a scalpel and go be a surgeon. Or since Donald Trump made a few good business deals he can handle diplomacy on a worldwide scale and not look like an idiot. Hey, I’m a mail carrier, but somebody that’s run a successful Quicky Mart could do it better than me!
