Mid-Year Federal Rules Tally Is The Lowest Ever Recorded

It’s July 1, mid-year 2025. The federal regulatory landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation.

After years of relentless compounding of federal rules and regulations and Federal Register pages–capped by Joe Biden’s self-proclaimed “whole-of-government” executive actions on the likes of DEI, ESG, net-zero and the “care economy”–conventioal federal regulation as we have known it has largely stopped.

The annual Ten Thousand Commandments report has, since 1993, tracked the inexorable accumulation of federal regulation. But mid-year data for 2025—Federal Register pages, total rules, significant rules, and executive orders—point to a striking departure from past trends.

The Federal Register–the daily chronicle of federal rules, proposed regulations, and notices–is a key barometer of regulatory output. At this mid-point of 2025, the chronicle contains “only” 1,255 rules among its generationally slender 28,799 pages.

Coincidentally, today’s Federal Register happens to be Trump’s fattest at 895 pages. It also contains his highest number of both proposed and final rules. But many of the proposed and final rules populating the Trump-era Register consist of pauses, revisions and withdrawals rather than hammer-down regulation of business and the public.

The trajectory seems clear–2025 is on pace to sport the lowest rule count of all time at an estimated 2,510 (that’s just a straight-line projection). That would best Trump’s own record for the all-time low rule count of 2,964 back in 2019. The takeaway seems to be that Trump’s one-in, ten-out exectutive order is having real effects, as the gross counts are the lowest ever seen, and largely deregulatory in character besides.

Historical rulemaking activity underscores the significance of these new developments. In 2024, agencies under Biden issued 3,248 final rules. Historically, rule counts were far higher, routinely and comfortably exceeding 4,000 before 2005–and even reaching teh 7,000s back in the 1970s.

A linear projection for the Federal Register housing all this rulemaking activity and unwinding would place it at 57,598 pages on December 31. If that’s what materializes, one would need to go back to 1992 and the first George Bush to find a Federal Register that thin.

By contrast, the 2024 Federal Register under Biden ballooned to an all-time record 106,109 pages, easily breaking Obama’s record of 95,894 in 2016. Under Biden’s progressive activism, the nation was on the path of a million Federal Register pages per decade.

Trump II is bucking these trends even more than the glance provided above. Before leaving office in Janiuary, Biden added 7,648 pages to the Register, leaving a “net” of just 21,151 pages attributable to the Trump administration and heralding a straight-line projection even lower than 57,598 pages. All in all the pace suggests 2025 will easily undercut even Trump’s 2017 low of 61,067 pages, which was the leanest Federal Register since, again, 1992.

Similarly, while 2025 has seen just 1,255 rules, fully 243 of those are attributable to Biden, leaving Trump with a “net” of already largely deregulatory rulemakings of 1,012. Such stalling of regulatory activity is unprecedented.

Significant rules—those with economic effecs of $100 million or more, as defined by Executive Order 12866—are another critical metric. In 2023, Biden issued 342 significant rules–and counts in the hundreds have been common since tracking of them began in the 1990s. Trump’s first term changed that, with his highest count of 214 coming in 2017 (a year that included some Obama rules). Trump’s signficant rule counts never reached 100 in 2019 and 2020; and even here, a number were “Deregulatory” under the auspices of the first term’s one-in, two-out operational mode.

Here at mid-year 2025, only 68 significant rules have been recorded, and these reflect the same concerted prioritization of regulatory streamlining that applies to rules generally under Trump. For example, as it happens, three of four “significant” rules published just today are withdrawals/recissions of earlier rules or proposals. The final significant rule count for 2025, still TBD of course, seems poised to be among the lowest ever if not the lowest–and unquestionably so when deregulatory measures are netted out. The upcoming “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions” is anticipated to showcase agencies’ intended streamlining plans across the board.

Executive orders, tools presidents routinely use to to govern the executive branch but also often employ to try to shape spending and regulatory policy for good or ill, also display a shift. As of today, Trump has signed 164 executive orders, an extraordinarily brisk pace compared to predecessors (well, most of them: FDR is a standout).

However, unlike Biden’s orders–which routinely expanded whole-of-government regulatory frameworks–Trump’s 2025 orders emphasize dismantling Biden-era rulings and forcing courts to test the limits of streamlining frameworks. These efforts are substantially rooted in the Supreme Court’s own recent rulings striking down prior regulatory over-reach, such as the now-discarded Chevron Doctrine. Particularly notable here is E.O. 14219’s (“Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Regulatory Initiative”) directive to “commence the deconstruction” of the administrative state by mandating reviews of regulations for legal consistency, national interest and slashing bureaucratic bloat.

Fewer rules and pages translate to less red tape and less stifling of innovation, potentially unleashing fresh economic dynamism. Offsetting this–and addressed elsewhere and in need of careful monitoring–are Trump’s own discordant tendencies toward intervention in the form of tariffs, antitrust, and an affinity toward price regulation in entertainment and health care. Swampy moves like these can overwhelm savings from deregulation.

Compared to Federal Registers of prior yeasr, however, the leaner conventional regulatory enterprise we see here at mid-year 2025 marks a bold experiment in non-governance–in simple leaving things, businesses and people alone.

The yet to be determined final year tallies will tell the tale, but we seem off to an extraordinary start with heretofore unheard-of low levels of conventional regulatory activity.