President Donald Trump has made history again, this time for something he didn’t do: fill the swamp with new regulations.
In keeping his campaign promise to kill 10 Biden-Obama era federal regulations for every new one his administration proposed, the president’s team offered up the fewest rules since record-keeping began in the 1970s.
And in another groundbreaker, his administration cut the size of the Federal Register, the Bible of government regulations, by 42%. It went from a record high of 106,109 pages in the last year of the Biden administration to just 61,461 pages this year.
“Trump has clearly changed direction,” said Clyde Wayne Crews, who charted the president’s numbers for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The president was cheered by free market advocates in his first administration for eliminating two existing federal regulations for every new one he proposed. But, said Crews, his second administration has really been historic.
“Trump 2.0 arrived promising even more aggressive rollback than the first term. We saw a freeze of pending Biden regulations, a revived ‘one-in, 10-out’ pledge, the creation of the advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the enactment of more than a dozen congressional resolutions of disapproval zapping certain late-term Biden regulations,” he found.
Clearly, federal agencies got behind the Trump mandate. New regulations “cratered” under Trump this year to 2,441, and Crews said that 243 of those were proposed during the end of the Biden administration.
“Trump bested his own first-term low-water mark of 2,964 rules in 2019,” said Crews.
But, he added, much of the deregulatory campaign has been driven by executive orders that can be overturned by a new president unless Congress acts now to lock them in.
Looking ahead, Crews called on Congress to enact unbreakable deregulation laws.
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“The regulatory state Trump inherited is larger, more complex, and more deeply embedded than the one bequeathed by Barack Obama in 2017. Rollback is possible — and in key respects underway — but it can stall or reverse, and the locus of regulatory intervention can migrate,” he said in an upcoming CEI post shared with Washington Secrets.
“The real test ahead is whether deregulation will be made durable by Congress rather than episodic by executive officeholders,” he added.