Congress loves to write new laws that require new regulations. For example, health care reform and financial services reform took about 3,000 pages of legislation. But the regulations they require might take 10 times that many pages. It falls mostly to the career workforce to get that job done. But can they meet legal deadlines and still do a quality job?

"Federal agencies often have a great deal of difficulty doing even some of the most basic and important analysis for the really big, really important regulations," said Jerry Ellig, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

"This is in no way a criticism of the people whose job it is to do the analysis," Ellig told The Federal Drive with Tom Temin on Tuesday morning. "They're working hard, trying to do the best they can."

Ellig revealed that a study of the regulation process has uncovered "institutional problems" that get in the way of doing good analysis.