President-elect Donald Trump has promised to cut 10 regulations for each new one he creates, but as with many things in government, doing so will be a complicated affair.
“I’m pledging today that in my second term, we will eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every one new regulation,” Trump told the Economic Club of New York in September. “We’ll be able to do that quite easily, actually.”
Trump promised a 2-to-1 ratio during his first term and claims he hit it, but he is making government efficiency a central focus of his second term, especially via the high-profile Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“We have a country that is bloated with rules, regulations, and with, frankly, people that are unnecessary,” Trump told Time magazine in his Person of the Year interview. “We are going to need a lot of people in a lot of other jobs. We’re looking to get people into private sector jobs where they can do better and be more productive.”
That may be so, but there are also vested interests inside and outside of Washington that will fight Trump every step of the way, including through the regulatory process and likely in court as well.
In fact, President Joe Biden’s administration spent much of this spring working to “Trump-proof” the federal government just in case Trump returned to the White House.
How effective will those stalling efforts be? We’ll soon find out.
The Biden administration has been among the most aggressive in history in implementing costly new regulations, according to the American Action Forum, creating 1,099 new agency rules that will cost $1.8 trillion in bureaucratic spending and 347 million paperwork hours.
The total for Trump’s first term was $112 billion, while even the ideologically aligned Obama administration only totaled $492 billion in new rule costs during his first term.
Trump and his allies will have three paths toward ending the Biden-era regulations when he takes office, depending on what stage those rules have reached on Inauguration Day.
The first and easiest path will be to simply announce a pause on any as-yet-finished rules, halting progress on them on Jan. 20, 2025. That may seem like a dramatic step, but it has become standard practice when control of the White House changes from one party to the other.
Obama, first-term Trump, and Biden all enacted a regulatory freeze early in their terms.
The second path involves rules that have been finalized within 60 days of the new congressional session, which fall under what is known as the Congressional Review Act.
Passed in 1996, the CRA allows Congress to rescind recently finalized rules, but it was used only once before Trump’s first term. In 2017, Trump and a Republican Congress used it 14 times to nix Obama-era regulations, and Biden used it three times in early 2021.
Congress tried to use the CRA in 2023 to undo Biden’s student loan forgiveness schemes, but that effort was vetoed by the president, illustrating the difficulty of using the procedure under normal circumstances.
While 60 days may not seem long, since only legislative business days count, anything finalized after about Aug. 1, 2024, might be rescinded using this procedure, according to George Washington University’s CRA exploratory dashboard.
There are a few other hurdles that any new regulations must pass to escape the CRA, which could prove ripe for a motivated Republican Congress in early 2025.
“The CRA provides the 118th Congress with more than just the power to overturn regulations finalized within its last 60 legislative days,” Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Clyde Wayne Crews wrote in Forbes. “It also mandates that for any rule to be considered effective, it must be properly submitted by the relevant agencies to the Government Accountability Office and both chambers of Congress.”
But the CRA has still been used fewer than 20 times in its history and can be difficult to implement in the best of circumstances. The exceptionally narrow Republican House majority may complicate matters, along with the tight timeline, so only a relatively small number of the more than 1,000 rules finalized under Biden are likely to be rescinded in this way.
The other factor complicating matters is that Team Biden is fully aware of the existence of the CRA and thus finalized some of its most controversial rules in the spring.
That brings us to the third group — rules finalized ahead of the CRA cutoff date. Those will take the longest time and the most effort to rescind, though that won’t stop Trump from pursuing or overturning them.
For example, Biden moved in the spring to finalize rules against what Trump calls Schedule F, a policy that would expand the number of government employees the president can fire. Conservatives argue that too many government bureaucrats are not beholden to the president and thus form a vast “zombie state” that is immune to the results of elections and the will of voters.
“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump said in 2022. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”
Biden halted Trump’s Schedule F plans on Day One of his administration and finalized a rule against it in the spring. The Biden administration also released final rules regarding a controversial Title IX rewrite and a slew of environmental regulations in April.
Trump will have to go through the full rulemaking process to rescind any finalized rules, submitting a proposed rule, taking comments on it from the public, and then listing the final rule before implementation, a process that can take up to two years.
That process may give Trump a less exciting “Day One” agenda, but it is unlikely to stop him, just as the Biden administration has gone through the same process to put its rule in place since 2021.
The slow pace of the process, however, combined with the inherently temporary nature of any presidential term, has some scholars arguing that Trump and his Elon Musk-led DOGE will need to keep a sharp focus.
“You need to be precise in your analysis and what you’re changing because there will be legal challenges to any number of rules, and that really can throw a wrench into your plans if you don’t cross your Ts and dot your Is,” said Dan Goldbeck, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum.
One irony of the situation is that even the process for slashing regulations is slow and methodical, preventing the kind of speed with which Trump would like to move. Rules cannot technically be rescinded directly, only replaced with new rules that counteract the old ones.
Nonetheless, Trump is fired up with a month to go before he takes office, promising big things as soon as he walks back into the Oval Office.
“There are many things you can do without Congress,” he said in his Time interview. “When it comes to cutting, harder to get, but to cut, you can do a lot of things without Congress.”
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And cutting, he continued, is what he was elected to do, no matter how much work it takes.
“We’re going to see what happens,” Trump said. “We have some interesting months coming up at the beginning. We’re going to see what happens. But this country is bloated.”