We use analytics cookies to understand how readers use the site. They only run if you accept. Privacy policy.
The six universal dives are asked of every subject at this tier. This is not one of them. It exists because of one thing this subject has been — office-holder — and a subject who has not been that never gets this page. That is why this record has 11 overlay dives to write rather than a number every record shares. All six base dives were written first, and that ordering is a rule rather than a habit: an overlay dive published on its own is a page about the part of someone chosen by whoever built it.
This dive counts agency rules. The one that counts what the president signs himself is The Output, and the two do not share a figure — a few hundred documents against several thousand rules.
The six base dives and the other 10 overlay dives are listed on the full record.
A president signs a few hundred documents in a term. The agencies beneath him publish several thousand rules under the Administrative Procedure Act, and that is where nearly all policy actually lives. The dive that counts what he signs himself is The Output; neither number appears on the other page.
Final rules published in the first 567 days of each administration. Rules are counted over the first 567 days of each administration — the age of the current one on the day this page was built — so an unfinished term is never compared against the full length of a finished one.
Final rules published in the same 567-day window: 5,389, then 5,091, then 4,916, then 4,046. That is a quarter fewer over sixteen years, and the decline runs through both parties without a break. Nothing on this page attributes that trend to anyone — it is the backdrop against which the next chart should be read.
One of seventeen dives on the full record. Two of the four administrations charted here are Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's, both of whom carry this overlay and will get this dive with the same measures — a comparison across four administrations cannot be drawn inside one record without it reading as a claim about that record alone.