Council Of Economic Advisers Highlights Trump’s Rule-Cutting In New Report

The White House Council of Economic Advisers’ June 2025 report, The Economic Benefits of Current Deregulatory Policies, rightly underscores how “[e]xcess regulation harms economic activity by increasing compliance costs and misallocating resources away from more profitable activities, thus discouraging innovation, investment, and economic growth.”

The administration contends that combined savings from pre-empting the Biden regulatory agenda “could be as high as $907 billion dollars or over $10,600 per family of four in present value terms if all the preempted regulatory proposals had otherwise been finalized.”

That sum still falls short of the agency-acknowledged costs of the full Biden program to which this statement refers, but the number is striking.

Illustrating the substantial sweep of regulation, the CEA notes that “the upper bound associated with the elimination of just the Biden Administration’s regulations results in cost savings equivalent to a 0.29% to 0.78% boost in annual economic growth over 20 years.” The first figure is based on taking agencies at their own word; the high end is based on the work of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan.

My own Ten Thousand Commandments report, clocking annual federal regulatory costs at $2.155 trillion ($16,016 per household), backs the optimistic case for potential savings touted by CEA. The regulatory state is a wallet-draining beast, and the incremental gains from even modest rollbacks can be huge. While the CEA focuses on reversing Biden’s agenda, the real task is wrestling with the century-old administrative state itself.

The CEA spotlights Trump’s one-in, ten-out regulatory budget—scrapping ten rules for each significant new one added. That program has so far targeted headline-grabbing Biden overreach in areas such as net-zero policies–including rollbacks of “appliance conservation standards” and vehicle fuel economy mandates.

While one-in, ten-out is a centerpiece, the CEA report notes that “over 20 presidential actions (i.e., executive orders, presidential memoranda, and presidential proclamations) … promote regulatory reform,” calling that “a record for any President in their first 100 days in office.” These actions include:

• Rescinding executive orders and proposed regulations from prior administrations;
• Eliminating DEI programs;
• Removing regulatory barriers to energy supply and natural resource extraction;
• Sunsetting obsolete energy rules;
• Cutting regulations that raised costs for food, housing, energy, and healthcare;
• Clearing obstacles to U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence;
• Dismantling rules impeding innovation in digital assets and finance;
• Revoking unconstitutional (based on recent court decisions) rules and regulations that hinder competition.

These moves chip away at the 188,000 pages bloating the Code of Federal Regulations, freeing businesses and families from bureaucratic quicksand.

But here’s the hitch: some of Trump’s own policies threaten to undermine these gains. Tariffs on steel, consumer goods and more clash with the deregulation message. Antitrust crackdowns—particularly in tech—substitute bureaucratic meddling for market dynamism, stifling the very competition they purport to protect. Even entertainment pricing, of all things, has come under scrutiny; if government intervention is justified there, it’s hard to draw any meaningful line at all. That dilutes both the message and the momentum.

With the government’s tentacles entwined across the economy—$2.1 trillion in annual regulatory costs is more than the entire nominal federal budget was not so many years ago—there is plenty room for far more streamlining than just reversing Biden-era rules.

The CEA’s report lays out completed and ongoing reforms with real potential. But to truly shake Washington, Congress must build on these actions with regulatory streamlining laws, as well as by taking steps to codify recommendations of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on both spending cuts and deregulation.

The likely next touch-point for a regulatory reset will be the new Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, in which agencies are expected to outline reform priorities that would have been unthinkable in prior administrations.

Trump’s deregulatory case and record are both strong—but so is his instinct to second-guess markets. That tension must be resolved. Deregulation and market micromanagement will never mix—and Trump can’t have it both ways.