Backdoor rulemaking: The government’s obsession with guidance
Federal agencies are increasingly using guidance documents to govern without following formal rulemaking processes. These documents, intended to clarify existing laws, often impose new policies and pressures on states and businesses. This trend raises concerns about accountability and the constitutional implications of regulation by intimidation.
- ▪Federal agencies have identified over 100,000 guidance documents, a significant increase under the Biden administration.
- ▪Guidance documents can create a chilling effect on compliance due to threats of enforcement actions.
- ▪The use of guidance to impose new policies without proper rulemaking procedures undermines the accountability of government agencies.
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Record
| Original publisher | Washington Examiner |
| Canonical URL | https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op-eds/4586097/the-governments-obsession-with-guidance/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T10:02:09.012Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T10:02:09.012Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | X0V4PthiSaLW |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Federal agencies repeatedly govern Americans through documents that are not supposed to carry the force of law. In theory, these “guidance documents” should merely explain how an agency is interpreting existing statutes and regulations. In practice, however, they often function as a shortcut around the lawmaking and rulemaking processes. That should concern anyone who cares about accountable government. Recommended Stories The FDA’s problem isn’t personnel — it’s enforcement Embracing the future: Say no to driver-in mandates Cold War 2.0: China didn’t challenge America from outside — it rose from within Congress writes laws.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Washington Examiner.
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