The European Parliament adopted 13,000 new legal acts between 2019 and 2024, compared with 3,500 in the United States over the same period.
72% confidence
EconomyInternational
Omissions
The 13,000 figure is an EU-wide count of legal acts (regulations, directives, decisions, including delegated and implementing acts adopted by the Commission), not the number of acts adopted by the European Parliament; attributing them to 'this House' overstates the EP's role.
The comparison is not methodologically symmetrical: the EU count includes technical implementing/delegated acts, while the 3,500 US figure counts federal legislation and excludes US federal agency rulemaking (which would run into the thousands of rules per year).
Some accounts give a higher US figure of about 5,500 when congressional resolutions (roughly 2,000) are added to the ~3,500 pieces of legislation; the speaker uses the narrower legislation-only figure.
The underlying figures originate in Mario Draghi's September 2024 report on EU competitiveness and were widely repeated in commentary; the primary report text could not be retrieved within the search budget, so verification rests on independent secondary/academic renderings of it.
The speaker is an AfD MEP using the comparison to argue EU over-regulation; the selection of a raw act-count metric (rather than, e.g., acts in force, pages of legislation, or economic cost) is the most favourable framing for that narrative.