Regulation and Its Real Impact on Affordability: This Past Week at the Center for Regulatory Freedom

Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) filed a wide range of regulatory comments across multiple federal agencies. At first glance, these proceedings may seem unrelated—covering everything from child care and car loans to energy reliability, health care staffing, telecommunications security, and paperwork reduction. But taken together, they tell a coherent story about the state of federal regulation—and why regulatory discipline matters more than ever.

Across agencies and issue areas, a common pattern has emerged: well-intentioned policies that overlook cost, feasibility, and real-world impacts often end up harming the very people they are meant to help. CRF’s work last week focused on pushing back against that pattern—urging agencies to ground their decisions in evidence, statutory limits, and economic reality.

Affordability Is Not an Abstraction

One of the strongest themes across CRF’s filings was affordability. Not as a slogan, but as a concrete, measurable outcome that matters to families, workers, and small businesses.

In comments to the Department of Transportation, CRF warned that proposed fuel-economy standards relied on overly optimistic assumptions that would drive up vehicle prices. When regulatory mandates outpace infrastructure readiness and consumer demand, the result isn’t innovation—it’s fewer affordable options. Higher prices delay fleet turnover, keep older and less safe vehicles on the road, and disproportionately burden working families who have the least flexibility to absorb added costs.

Similarly, in comments to the Internal Revenue Service, CRF supported Congress’s decision to provide temporary car-loan interest relief (something championed by President Trump)—but cautioned that overcomplicated implementation could undermine its purpose. A tax benefit that exists on paper but is difficult to claim in practice does little to help families manage rising costs. Regulatory implementation should facilitate affordability, not bury it under reporting requirements and technical traps--precisely the opposite of what the President and Congressional Republicans pushed for.

Affordability also drove CRF’s engagement with the Department of Health and Human Services on child care. Years of federal subsidies layered atop increasingly rigid regulatory frameworks have not made child care more affordable. Instead, they have constrained supply—especially among small, home-based, and community providers—pushing prices higher for families. CRF urged regulators to confront that reality and focus on reducing administrative and regulatory barriers that inflate costs without improving outcomes. It should be noted that CRF raised these issues to the Biden Administration, leading a group of conservative groups to file comments. President Biden and Kamala Harris ignored CPAC's warnings, and our concerns of higher prices and decreased access came to pass.

Energy Reliability Is an Affordability Issue

In comments to the Environmental Protection Agency on coal ash closure deadlines, CRF emphasized that energy policy cannot be divorced from reliability. Rigid timelines that force premature power plant shutdowns do not strengthen environmental protection—they raise electricity prices and increase the risk of grid instability.

CRF supported EPA’s proposal to provide limited flexibility while maintaining environmental safeguards.

The key point was simple: environmental protection and affordability are not in conflict when regulation is properly designed. But when timing mandates become de facto shutdown orders, families and businesses pay the price through higher energy costs and reduced reliability.

Regulatory Discipline Protects National Security

National security featured prominently in CRF’s comments to the Federal Communications Commission on supply-chain and equipment authorization rules. CRF strongly supports protecting U.S. communications networks from genuine security threats—but warned that overbroad, poorly scoped rules can weaken security by slowing upgrades, raising costs, and diverting resources from actual risk mitigation.

Security regulations must be narrow, statute-anchored, and administrable. When agencies stretch existing authorities into open-ended compliance regimes, they risk regulatory creep that burdens small providers, delays modernization, and ultimately undermines resilience. CRF urged the FCC to focus on clear threats and verifiable risks rather than expansive mandates untethered from demonstrated need.

This same principle appeared in CRF’s work on robocall mitigation. Consumers are rightly frustrated by scam calls, but prescriptive mandates that over-block lawful communications or impose heavy compliance costs on small and rural providers do not solve the problem. Effective enforcement against bad actors—not regulatory micromanagement—is the path to restoring trust in the communications network.

Small Businesses Bear the Hidden Costs

A recurring concern across CRF’s filings was the disproportionate impact of regulatory accumulation on small entities.

In health care, CRF warned that rigid federal staffing mandates for long-term care facilities would reduce access and raise costs, especially in rural areas. Workforce shortages are real, and one-size-fits-all ratios ignore regional variation and operational reality. Protecting seniors requires flexibility and targeted oversight—not mandates that force facilities to close or reduce admissions.

In child care, telecommunications, energy, and public health programs, CRF repeatedly highlighted how compliance costs fall hardest on small operators with limited administrative capacity. Large entities may absorb new paperwork, reporting, and monitoring requirements. Small organizations often cannot—and they exit the market instead. The result is less competition, fewer choices, and higher prices.

Paperwork Reduction Is Policy Reform

CRF’s comments to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its Fellowship Management System underscore a frequently overlooked truth: paperwork is policy.

CRF supported CDC’s decision to scale back unnecessary data collection, including alumni tracking and excessive activity monitoring. But the revised burden estimates also revealed how prior paperwork costs had been understated. CRF urged regulators to treat this not as a one-time fix, but as a lesson: information collection systems naturally expand unless disciplined review and pruning are built in.

Paperwork reduction is not about convenience. It is about cost, capacity, and effectiveness—especially for state, local, and small public health entities that must divert limited resources to compliance instead of mission-critical work.

Science, Law, and Regulatory Legitimacy

Finally, CRF’s comments on EPA’s updated formaldehyde risk analysis highlight the importance of scientific discipline in regulation. By grounding its analysis in chemical-specific evidence and peer review, EPA improved both the credibility and durability of its work.

Sound science protects public health while avoiding unnecessary economic disruption. When agencies rely on unsupported assumptions or overly conservative defaults, they risk triggering downstream consequences that affect housing, manufacturing, and supply chains. CRF emphasized that rigorous, transparent science is not an obstacle to protection—it is essential to it.

The Big Picture

What ties all of CRF’s work last week together is a simple but often ignored principle: regulation should solve real problems without creating bigger ones.

Affordability, access, national security, and small business vitality are not peripheral concerns. They are core measures of whether regulation is working. When agencies substitute aspiration for analysis, or process for outcomes, families and communities feel the consequences.

CRF will continue to engage across agencies to ensure that regulatory decisions are grounded in evidence, faithful to statutory limits, and attentive to real-world impacts. Because good regulation is not about doing more—it’s about doing better.