The incoming Trump Administration again promises massive deregulation, but it remains to be seen how much can realistically be rolled back.
President Donald J. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that a hallmark of his first term was an unprecedented rollback in regulations. That first Trump Administration’s deregulatory effort had been both symbolized by and institutionalized with Executive Order 13,771, which established a one-in-two-out policy calling upon federal agencies to identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed for every new one introduced. In his first term, President Trump asserted that, under this policy, his Administration saw a “record number of regulations eliminated.” More recently, as a candidate and President-elect, Trump has stated that his first Administration “approved more regulation cuts than any president in history times five.”
But the claims President Trump has made about how his first Administration reduced the pages of regulations, achieved a high ratio of deregulatory to regulatory actions, and performed in comparison with past administrations have all been greatly exaggerated or are downright false or misleading. With President Trump making similar projections about what he intends to accomplish in his second term, it is natural to ask whether the same will hold true over the next four years. The answer will depend on how “Trump 2.0” differs from and is similar to “Trump 1.0.”
When it comes to Trump 1.0’s having cut the pages of federal regulations, President Trump has claimed that his first Administration “removed nearly 25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations—more than any other President by far in the history of our country, whether it was four years, eight years, or, in one case, more than eight years.” But when looking at the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations—the authoritative source of operative, binding federal rules—no such reduction appears. Admittedly, the historically increasing trend in pages did slow during the Trump Administration, but rather than cutting the Code by 25,000 pages, the Administration increased it by about 1,500 pages.
Similarly, the Administration’s claim of an unprecedented ratio of deregulatory actions to new regulatory ones was off base with reality. Trump officials sometimes claimed as many as 22 deregulatory actions to each new regulatory one—with assertions of other ratios ranging from seven to one to around 10 to one. Put aside for a moment whether it makes much sense to use overall ratios of the number of rules eliminated-to-added, because eliminating even 10 Peter Rabbit-equivalent rules from the books cannot truly equate with imposing a single War and Peace-equivalent rule. But when one looks at the government’s comprehensive Unified Regulatory Agenda over the course of the Trump 1.0 years, and compares the overall number of final regulatory actions to the number of final actions the Administration classified as deregulatory, the ratio actually turned out to be about three to one. That is, the Administration took three regulatory actions for every deregulatory one.
If one compares only economically or otherwise significant regulatory actions with similarly significant deregulatory actions, the ratio turned out to be two to one. Again, the Administration took more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones.
These data are all drawn from the standard sources published by the Trump Administration itself, and they are examined in further detail in a co-authored report that I released toward the conclusion of the first Trump term. In that report, my coauthors and I also looked at the historical record, because President Trump has frequently claimed that his Administration accomplished more by way of deregulation than any of its predecessors. “We got you the biggest regulation cuts,” he said in his infamous speech at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021. “There’s no President, whether it’s four years, eight years, or in one case more, got anywhere near the regulation cuts.”
But is this so?
Other presidents have pursued deregulatory efforts. As recent remembrances of President Jimmy Carter have noted, the nation took exceptionally consequential steps under his watch to deregulate major sectors of the economy, including airlines, trucking, railroads, and telecommunications. President Carter also instituted a White House process for reviewing new regulations, an effort that President Ronald Reagan built upon by establishing a formal review process for major regulatory proposals under Executive Order 12,291. President Bill Clinton updated the Reagan order with one of his own—Executive Order 12,866—and it has continued to govern White House review of regulations ever since.
The Clinton Administration also undertook a widescale reconsideration of existing regulations as part of his National Performance Review, cleaning pages of old rules out of the Code of Federal Regulations. President Barack Obama presided over a “retrospective review” process that also eliminated outdated rules.
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