President Donald Trump is doubling down on his demand that federal agencies kill Biden- and Obama-era regulations.
Faced with slow action by his team, the Office of Management and Budget has just issued a nine-page demand that his government speed up deregulation efforts.
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“The goal of this memorandum is to offer guidance to the agencies as to how to bolster, streamline, and speed … the deregulation of facially unlawful prior government regulations,” said OMB. “Deregulation has important, unique impacts.”
In Trump’s first administration, he ordered that two past regulations be eliminated for every new one created. Agencies found it easy to beat that ratio, killing over five old rules for every new one.
In his second administration, he ordered 10 killed for every new one created, which agencies have found difficult to match.
OMB’s new demands for deregulation are meant to spark action inside federal agencies, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., the regulation expert with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Its goal, he said, is to end the “tepid follow-through” by agencies of the president’s demands and executive order on deregulation. “The sweeping flash-reversals Trump and OMB have envisioned have yet to materialize,” he said.
Crews, who charts the costly effects of regulations, said agencies find it a lot easier to issue new rules than to knock them down. That is likely even more the case after former President Joe Biden’s administration used its regulatory powers to get around GOP control of Congress.
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“Agencies,” he blogged today, “have been slow to follow through, with few invoking ‘good cause’ to roll back unlawful rules. The new streamlining memo laments that ‘to date, agencies do not appear to be fully maximizing their energy in carrying out these directives.’”
Crews also explained to Forbes, “The streamlining memo opens optimistically with conciliatory language about using the guidelines ‘to make OIRA [OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] your partner in the deregulation agenda.’ But agencies have rarely developed their own deregulatory agendas. Such efforts typically arise from external pressure or deregulatory-minded appointees whose agendas vanish once progressives return.”