If a law doesn’t work, waive it away?

At about the same time, HHS began shutting down the waiver program - an action it announced on a Friday afternoon, the customary way to bury bad news in Washington. Companies now face a September deadline to apply for protection. After that, they’re out of luck. According to the administration, without the special treatment, health care premiums for 3 million workers would have gone up by 10 percent or more. A note to social engineers of all parties: If you have to protect 3 million people from a brand-new law, it probably wasn’t very well written in the first place.

That this was an unintended consequence is clear from the fact that the law never contemplated a need for waivers in the first place. In a stroke of bureaucratic magic, HHS simply granted itself the power, and started dispensing the passes. Only when independent groups started pressing for transparency did things begin to shut down.

The broader lesson here is that the constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It’s a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework.

The waiver process exposes another deeper danger as well: the arbitrary application of government power. The ability to absolve companies of regulatory obligations creates uncertainty, even fear, in the business community. Companies are left to hope, beg, and plead for special treatment, often because their competitors have already received a free pass. That’s the plight of 150,000 workers whose employers were denied the ObamaCare pass.

Consider the administration’s recent proposal to raise fuel efficiency standards to 56 miles per gallon by 2025. That’s more than twice the current standard - intimidating enough for staggering automakers with no current technology to meet the goal. As a kicker, the Department of Energy will re-evaluate the current fuel economy target in 2020, and either ease the rules or toughen them based on how far the industry has “progressed.” That comes perilously close to a threat.