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Notes -
I’d agree very strongly with balanced budget amendments as good. But I don’t see any way to slow the growth of regulatory agencies other than having the government — be it executive or legislative — have to manually re-approve the agency (with the default being no) at regular intervals will at least allow for review and revision and avoid mission creep. If we have a department of horse welfare in 2025, it doesn’t need to exist anymore because few people need horses for transportation.
If there is some non-trivial amount of work to re-review each regulation, then a balanced budget would also impose limits on at least the number of regulations. It would be harder to account for the impact of a regulation's scope though. Maybe if it was coupled with constitutionally-backed standing to sue if you are affected by a regulation which doesn't meet strict scrutiny for not being over-broad.
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The problem is almost never that an agency outlives the original purpose, like horses becoming largely irrelevant.
The problem is that the original purpose is inflated, particularly in a regulatory way. But that's usually not literally the agency's fault. It's usually a combo the Congress and the courts, and/or a presidential initiative. So the Department of Transportation is forever, horses or not. "Do they have good policies?" is the real question and a harder one to answer.
We have the system we have because "we" "wanted" it. Manual reapproval would be very hard to even design--look at how there's gridlock for the budget. Scaling that up won't help us get an effective limited government.
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