President Donald Trump is continuing to dismantle former President Joe Biden’s model for giving Washington bureaucrats power to regulate Main Street to Wall Street.
In a little-noticed executive order issued last week, Trump, in just 10 words, brushed aside a Biden order that was written to sound deregulatory but actually gave the Washington swamp extraordinary powers to consolidate its regulatory powers.
Trump’s executive order simply said: “Executive Order 14036 of July 9, 2021 (Promoting Competition in the American Economy), is hereby revoked.”
It targeted a Biden order that was promoted as pushing competition in government by actually rebranding “regulation as ‘competition’ in true Orwellian fashion,” according to deregulation expert Clyde Wayne Crews, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Rather than promoting competition, Biden’s order increased federal control of already heavily regulated sectors like agriculture, airlines, broadband, banking, health care, and technology. The Biden order even coaxed nominally independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission into expanded antitrust and price-control schemes,” said Crews.
As he has with Biden’s immigration policies, Trump and his Office of Management and Budget have moved fast to reverse Biden’s regulatory policies. He has already slashed several Biden-era regulations that had the potential to cost Americans billions of dollars.
Republicans in Congress have also helped by eliminating some of Biden’s key regulations, including several green initiatives.
Crews has tabulated Biden’s regulatory record to show that it was unmatched in the number and cost of new rules. Even the Federal Register, Washington’s regulation bible, reached a new record for pages printed.
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Federal agencies were quick to fall in line behind Trump’s new order, including the Justice Department, which said that it would work to “remove barriers” to private development.
“America First Antitrust focuses on empowering the American people in the free markets, not enabling regulators and bureaucrats to prescribe outcomes,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “We are unleashing the new American Golden Age through antitrust enforcement that removes barriers to innovation and opportunity and limits regulatory burdens on free competition,” she added.