Checking In On Trump’s Deregulation

Early in the first Trump administration, agencies were directed to eliminate at least two rules for every “significant” rule added. While a significant rule can be many things, it’s generally understood as one freighted with at least $100 million in annual economic effects.

Donald Trump, July 16, 2020; photo by the author

Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.

According to the administration’s “Final Accounting” reports on “Regulatory Reform under Executive Order 13771,” the 2017–2020 period produced a 2.5-to-one ratio of deregulatory to regulatory actions (240 to 97). It looked like this:

Counting non-significant deregulatory actions—bringing the total to 538—boosted the claimed “success rate” to 5.5 to one.

Critics disputed the numbers, but the centerpiece of the Trump approach was not so much rules-out tallies as a freeze on net new regulatory costs—an executive-driven regulatory budget unprecedented in the modern era.

In the Trump 2.0 era, a stronger one-in, ten-out directive is in play in the form of Executive Order 14,192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation.” This time it’s not just a cost freeze but a mandated net reduction:

“[T]he total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations … shall be significantly less than zero, as determined by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.”

We’ve already noted in this column that 2025 marks the year of the “Unrule.” As of September 22 there have been 1,879 final rules published the Federal Register, including 243 inherited from Biden. That projects to about 2,590 by year-end—the lowest ever—with the “net” even lower once deregulatory unrules are counted.

The recently released Spring edition of the “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions” suggests the one-in, ten-out policy is on track, with dozens of delays, recissions, withdrawals, waivers, extensions and rewrites. The administration claims to have removed “at least thirty existing regulations for every new regulation added.” A December roundup, coinciding with the Fall Agenda, will likely give the score.

Over a dozen Biden-era rules have been overturned via resolutions of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. These are actual laws signed by the president rather than rewrites of Biden regulations.

That spring Agenda (detailed in this column) portrayed 3,816 rules in the pipeline at the active, completed, and long-term stages, 243 of which are deemed “economically signficant” as seen here.

Among those 243 rules, and of most concern here, are the 40 completed economically signficant rules and what they may foretell for the Trump streamlining campaign. The fall Agenda will tell the story, but a relatively low 2025 rulemaking flow is indicated despite containing some transitional Biden issue (see chart below), and even without taking into account the atypical deregulatory character of some.

The Spring Agenda’s economically significant items fall into three broad buckets: (1) those that reduce burdens and are deregulatory; (2) those that add burdens by tightening standards, requirements, restrictions, or raising fees; and (3) those that are mixed, neutral, programmatic, or budgetary – perhaps ambiguous depending on the stakeholder’s perspective. Even if all 40 completed economically significant rules were regulatory, the administration could still point to hundreds of rollbacks and “unrules” of varying significance across a smaller administrative enterprise, with several months left in the calendar year to meet the one-in, ten-out goal.

Among the regulatory issue are some made effective while Biden was still in office, including Environmental Protection Agency limitations of exposure to perchloroethylene and a Federal Trade Commission rule on pricing of live events and lodging. Trump supports this latter type of intervention, so we never saw a rewrite or a resolution of disapproval targeting it. Other examples touch on food product health claims and Buy American standards,

Programmatic measures include Affordable Care Act and Social Security implementations and fees. Agriculture rules paperwork streamlining in assistance programs and disaster relief is welcome but still reflects acceptance of a large federal role.

On the deregulatory front one finds:

• Energy Department removals of conservation standards for water heaters, refrigerators and freezers removals pursuant to Congressional Review Act;
• Food and Drug Administraiton unwinding of prohibitions on flavored tobacco like strawberry and grape and menthol, and relaxation of regulation of nicotine levels;
• EPA partial waivers of biofuel volume requirements;
• Department of Transporation relaxation of speed limiter requirements for commercial motor vehicles;
• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation withdrawal of a proposal tightening brokered-deposit rules, and;
• Securities and Exchange Commission withdrawal of amendments to the Consolidated Audit Trail plan aimed at enhancing data security.

Plenty of Trump’s interventions — such as tariffs, pricing manipulations, a federal stake taken in Intel, and the pursuit of a sovereign wealth fund — tend not to show up as conventional rulemakes in the Federal Register but offset and even swamp his deregulatory moves. No cabinet members have significantly countered these, nor has Congress.

What we can say, as we await a first-year reckoning with the arrival of the fall Unified Agenda and a new, one hopes, “Final Accounting” for the year, is that the Trump 2.0 freezing and rollback of conventional notice and comment regulation do appear unprecedented, even revolutionary in the sense of demonstrating that the nation can function without agencies constantly issuing rules to govern our lives. Net savings do appear to be a thing.

Whether these advances endure will depend on offsetting Trump’s own regulatory impulses, and whether Congress reinforces genuine streamlining while curbing off-the-books regulatory expansions not captured in the Federal Register or the Unified Agenda.