Legislative Impact Accounting: Incorporating Prospective and Retrospective Review into a Regulatory Budget

Congressional decision‐making suffers from scarce information about the scope and economic consequences of legislative actions. This paper proposes a better method to overcome congressional information scarcity. Our proposal relies on the premise that regulations have similar economic effects as taxes and spending, and therefore should be scored and tracked as part of the budget process. Our proposed system of legislative impact accounting (LIA) builds on the concept of a regulatory budget by developing a system for both prospective and retrospective review to create an effective feedback loop to better communicate information about economic effects of regulations to Congress.