Rise Of The Unrule: Fewer Rules, Fewer Agencies, And No Apocalypse

There was Hollywood’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now meet Washington’s Year the Regulation Stopped.

The end of July 2025 finds just 1,490 finalized regulations published in the Federal Register, which itself stands at 35,964 pages. A typical year concludes with a bit over 3,000 completed rules.

That’s a milestone: this first year of the second Trump administration is on track—just as we noted at mid-year—to deliver the lowest rule count ever recorded, even lower than the 2,964 issued by Trump in 2019. In the realm of these notice-and-comment rules, Trump is besting his past cross-agency birdies with eagles.

What is more, fully 243 of those final rules and 7,648 of the pages came from Biden in January, leaving Trump with a net of only 1,247 rules (and 28,316 pages).

This is no blip. Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy and more boasting of dramatic rollbacks of unnecessary regulations, staff cuts, office closures and contract terminations.

But the sub-3,000 rule trajectory is actually eclipsed by something even more noteworthy.

This unprecedented stall in regulatory activity isn’t just about fewer rules—it marks the rise of the “Unrule.” Many of the “rules” from the Trump administration aren’t new mandates at all, but rather delays, withdrawals, recissions and RIP declarations. Even the 945 proposed rules so far tend to be deregulatory. Where necessary, some rules are being rewritten with fresh public input. But more broadly, the era is defined by the defunding of programs and the shuttering of offices.

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