This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 5th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Congress delegates regulatory authority, that's one Congress, one time, and executive agencies are free to take the mandate and run with it.

Should Congress instead compel itself to reauthorize the statutes that give away its own authorities? Would that finally re-engage Congress in its job of

overseeing federal regulation? Cato's Will Yeatman comments. In 2001 and 2002, passed authorizations for the use of military force.

And these were designed to go after Al Qaeda and presumably just Al Qaeda, the people who perpetrated the attacks of September

11th.

But those delegations have been stretched to their absolute limits, and it's led

a lot of people recently to ask, you know, this was one Congress delegating authority one time and here we are 18 years later and we're

still using those authorizations to wage war around the globe. And Jonathan Adler makes a point at the

Vula conspiracy that this is what happens every day with when it comes to regulation.

Indeed it does. I mean that's really the tip of the iceberg.

Everywhere you look, I mean for example the Federal Communications Commission their much

Ballyhooed net neutrality rules during the Obama era those were actually functions

of a law that was passed in the 1930s but you know of course well before the technologies that now abound in the media sector.

Another example is climate change regulation again this was in the second term of

President Obama's administration but the EPA used a statute passed in 1970

the Clean Air Act when there was simply no concerns whatsoever regarding

global climate change, when instead the core concern was smog, when EPA used that 40 year old law to implement a nationwide or to try to implement.

I mean ultimately the Trump administration reversed this measure but tried to

implement a nationwide cap and trade. So indeed it's the case

that regulatory powers exercised you know virtually all large regulations that you

...