> (As an aside, congress has ceded much of it's lawmaking authority to federal agencies anyway -- so even if they didn't pass any new laws, the legal code will still change every year.)

Normally this wouldn't be so bad, Congress is bad at making small evidence based changes on a reasonable timeline so instead they setup the rules for making the rules and the goals and instantiate or grant that authority to a division of the executive. Unfortunately it seems the courts have become very enthralled to varying degrees to the unitary executive theory which makes corralling that power more difficult.