Excessive Regulation: The Case of Federal Aid to Education

Notwithstanding the outright opposition to government that some of the charges of its excessiveness barely hide, the widespread political rhetoric in recent years about excessive federal regulation points up a real problem of modern government. In federal programs that are not explicitly regulatory, as well as in those that are, policy has come to be carried out by increasingly detailed, prescriptive, legalistic, and authoritative means. The familiar statistics on the rapidly expanding numbers of Federal Register pages, Washington lawyers, and state and local bureaucrats are but a few indicators of a development that politicians, businesses, and citizens are now sensing: federal policies are heavily administered, extensively rulebound, and seemingly inefficient. ' Surely the social benefits that are produced by these regulatory methods can be produced at lower cost by alternative means. But can they?