Bureaucrats churn out rules by the thousands every day, rules that have the force of law but which no elected lawmaker ever votes for or against. Rules and regulations are all promulgated according to the powers that Congress has "delegated" to the bureaucrats. Most bureaucratic rule-making only affects a very narrow interest, and hence the outcry against unreasonable rules is seldom heard beyond the office suites of Washington and Sacramento trade associations. But as the OSHA example shows, every once and a while a bureaucrat, in an effort to enhance job security by regulating everything that moves, makes a rule that affects a large portion of the population, and all hell breaks loose.

Labor Secretary Alexis Herman beat the speediest of retreats over this bureaucratic boner. "There is no federal role in people’s homes," she said, evading bureaucratic imperialism with a classic falsehood. The feds have no hesitation telling us that our toilets can only use 1.6 gallons per flush. This is the kind of liberalism which says that while we must keep government out of the bedroom, it’s okay for the government to be in our bathroom. So you understand why a narrow-minded OSHA bureaucrat would have little hesitation to extend workplace rules to our homes. And don’t suppose that this will be the last attempt to extend federal regulation beyond the aforementioned toilets to the rest of the house.

The bureaucrats will just try to come through our back doors under the cover of night. The biggest rule-making fight at the moment concerns ergonomics, the supposed risk to workers from repetitive stress injury. No doubt such injuries occur, but that an agency once worried about workers getting maimed or killed on the job is now chasing after the office equivalent of tennis elbow shows that there is no limit to the reach of regulation as it currently operates. Don’t be surprised to see OSHA argue that whatever ergonomic rules it comes up with must be applied to home offices. There goes my bean-bag chair.

Sooner or later, probably about the time the last molecule of ozone is wrung from our outdoor urban air, it will occur to the EPA what health experts have long known: that indoor air quality is worse than what most people are exposed to on city streets. What could be more natural, the EPA will think, than to extend clean air regulations to the household level?

It thus seems likely that the 21st century is going to be the Century of the Bureaucrat just as much as the 20th century, unless public outrage leads to true reform. The only way to regulate the regulators is to require that elected officeholders—Congressmen and Senators—be required to vote on each and every one of these rules. Right now they get to practice a two-step: "The EPA did what to you? Let me see if I can help." If they have to vote on the rules, they can’t dodge the blame.

— Steven Hayward