Welcome back to Gray Matters, the podcast of the Seaboard and Grace Center for the study of the administrative state.

I'm Jace LinkedIn, the Gray Center's Policy and Strategy Director.

With me again today is Bennett Neuss,

our research director. Hello, Bennett. Hey, thanks for going on the fort while I was gone. Yeah,

thanks for coming back. We're pleased to be joined today by Patrick McLaughlin. He's a research

fellow at the Hoover Institution and a visiting research fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation,

where he helped develop the

non-delegation project, which is what brings them to us today. Patrick, welcome to Grey Matters.

Thanks, guys. It's my pleasure to be here. So tell us a little bit about the non-delegation

project. How did you get started with all this? Well, I should tell everyone that first I'm an

economist, not a legal scholar, but nonetheless,

my whole career has really centered around ways that we can take the unstructured data

that is contained in legal texts, whether that statutes or regulations, and somehow turn that into

structured data that people like me, economists, or people with a quantitative bent, can

use to answer questions such as how do regulatory trends, how does regulatory policy

overall affect things like economic growth

or employment rates? So that was the impetus really for much of my career what I've been

doing. And that led me into the non-delegation project. So in the non-delegation project, I wanted to dig into a question of non-delegation.

We can probably explain what I'd mean there in a moment, but of the regulations that exist

in the Code of Federal Regulations, can we figure out, is there a number or a percentage of them that arguably

violate the non-delegation principle?

And if we can figure that out, what does that mean?

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