The Orange County
America’s AI electricity ‘crisis’ is easily fixed: Unleash market forces
The Orange County Register cited CEI’s expert on data centers public utility price. Communities are rebelling against the construction of massive data farms.
Blog
AI and the electricity blackout America needs
The Washington Post’s latest coverage of the so-called “data center rebellion” highlights a trend building across America: communities rising up against server farms powering…
Blog
Trump slashed rulemaking in 2025. The hard part starts in 2026
The new year, 2026, marks nearly the first full year of Donald Trump’s second administration. It’s a moment to assess whether regulatory liberalization has genuinely…
Blog
Deregulation’s year-end illusion
As the year winds down, The Trump administration is congratulating itself on deregulation. In a White House statement and in what it described as an…
Blog
Trump’s AI order: Preempting the states without unleashing Washington
A new Trump executive order, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” pushes back on most state law and rulemaking affecting AI. Top…
Blog
Trump’s baby accounts: Wealth builder or redistribution trap?
A White House roundtable this week spotlighted Michael and Susan Dell’s $6.25 billion philanthropic contribution seeding newborn investment “Trump Accounts” beyond the federal…
Blog
Two cheers for ending Humphrey’s Executor
Oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter begin today. While debates over the legitimacy of presidential removal authority and the degree of Senate involvement…
Blog
Stop the snapback: Congress can make small-business deregulation stick
This week, CEI sent a letter to Congress urging the House to pass Rep. Beth Van Duyne’s (R-TX) H.R. 2965, the Small Business…
Letters
CEI Letter of Support on the Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act
Members of Congress, We write to reiterate our strong support for Rep. Van Duyne’s (TX-24) Small Business Regulatory Reduction Act (SBRRA). Recent…
Blog
DOGE cancellation theatrics change nothing in the regulatory power game
“Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists.” That admission came 10 paragraphs into a widely reported “exclusive” Reuters story claiming…
Blog
A tariff-funded UBI? Trump just gave progressives their blueprint
Donald Trump’s pitch for a $2,000 “tariff dividend” check to be issued sometime next year (during election season) is being marketed as a windfall…
InsideHealthPolicy
Shutdown Stalled Deregulatory Action At HHS, In Congress
“Jeremy Nighohossian, a health policy expert and economist at regulatory reform organization the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told Inside Health Policy in a statement that…
Blog
An executive order to make freedom mandatory
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) new “Streamlining the Review of Regulatory Actions” memorandum signals a potentially transformative shift in Washington’s…
Forbes
Regulation Renovation: The Executive Order To Make Deregulation Permanent
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s new Streamlining the Review of Regulatory Actions memorandum signals a preferential stance toward deregulation, urging…
Blog
The deregulation machine hits bureaucratic resistance
A new White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo, “Streamlining the Review of Deregulatory Actions,” poses an ambitious test: can agencies use…
Blog
Darklore Depository 2025: An unofficial inventory of guidance documents and other regulatory dark matter
Halloween can remind policy wonks that some of the ghastliest regulatory chills come not from ordinary notice-and-comment regulation buried in the daily Federal Register, but…
Forbes
Washington’s Hidden Rulebook: The 2025 Darklore Depository And The Case For Guidance Document Reform
Agencies also say “BOO” with guidance documents, statements of policy, memoranda, notices, bulletins, advisory opinions, directives, news releases, letters and even blog posts. We call…
Forbes
$1 Trillion And Counting: Do Federal Grants Sabotage Regulatory Reform?
There’s been much attention to Donald Trump’s streamlining and “deconstruction” of conventional notice-and-comment regulation this year – a campaign that includes…
Blog
Has Washington bought off the deregulatory movement?
Back during the Biden administration, I noted how rising federal spending and regulation seemed to swap unfunded mandates for funded ones – turning what should…
Blog
The hidden growth of government in an age of less red tape
Recent editions of Ten Thousand Commandments detail how regulatory red tape mushroomed under Biden. For vulnerable small business, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council…
Forbes
Small Business Regulation Is Cratering – Here’s The Hidden Catch
But during the Biden administration, red tape proliferated. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council noted, for example, the toll from credit card…
Forbes
Turn Shutdown Theater Into A Slim-Down: Cut Spending And Regulation At Once
Looming federal government shutdowns should be treated as opportunities to cut both spending and regulation. So as we barrel toward a potential…
Blog
Shutdown? Take the win
Last-ditch negotiations are underway as another fiscal year comes to a close on October 1. It’s that familiar crossroads: a threatened shutdown if a funding…
Blog
A provisional look at the Trump 2.0 deregulation record
Early in his first term, Donald Trump ordered agencies to eliminate at least two rules for every “significant” one added – rules generally carrying $100…
Blog
GOOD Act markup: The first step in illuminating regulatory dark matter
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) is soon expected to mark up the Guidance Out of Darkness (GOOD) Act, an important bipartisan…
Comment
CEI is in Support of the GOOD Act: Bringing Federal Guidance Out of the Shadows
Dear Members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, We write to you today ahead of markup of the Guidance Out of…
Blog
Trump’s Unified Agenda of deconstruction: Writing rules to erase rules
“It is the policy of my Administration to focus the executive branch’s limited enforcement resources on regulations squarely authorized by…
Forbes
Diary Of Deconstruction: Trump Releases Unified Agenda Of Federal Regulations
As the leaves begin to fall, the Trump administration has at last released Spring 2025 edition of the semiannual “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and…
Politico
How AI could fuel a boom in carbon capture
Politico cited CEI’s expert on temporary regulations “Many of the ‘rules’ that have been issued under Trump aren’t new mandates at all, but rather rescissions,…
Blog
There’s something wrong with the Federal Register
The Trump-era Federal Register website has been glitching recently. Nearly two weeks ago, I noted on X/Twitter (tagging both @USNatArchives and @FedRegister) that the…
Forbes
When Washington Buys Intel, It Owns You Too
The past week has seen many decrying the folly of government picking winners in business. But the Trump administration’s announcement of an 8.9 percent …
Blog
Washington just bought Intel—and sold capitalism
Back in 2010, I testified before Congress against reauthorizing the so-called America COMPETES Act. That legislation was the precursor to the much-ballyhooed CHIPS and…
Blog
Trump revokes Biden’s bogus competition order, but it’s only a start
President Donald Trump just revoked President Biden’s 2021 “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.” That’s welcome news, as I explain in…
Blog
Half of 2025’s public laws are Biden rule killers
In a notable twist, Congress has spent half of 2025’s lawmaking undoing Biden regulations. So far in the 119th Congress, 31 public laws have been…
Blog
AI’s real job threat is to Washington, not workers
There’s no denying artificial intelligence (AI) can replace a lot—including, eventually, the very think tankers analyzing its effects as we do occasionally here at CEI.
Blog
How ‘Unrules’ are powering down the bureaucracy
The year 2025 may be remembered as the year regulation hit pause. As of the end of July, 1,518 finalized federal rules have been published…
Forbes
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…
Blog
Trump’s AI Action Plan: Deregulation on paper, industrial policy in practice?
Donald Trump’s follow-up executive orders to his 2020 artificial intelligence (AI) offerings and the new Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan signal…
News Release
CEI experts react to White House AI Action Plan
Today, the White House released “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan”, a multi-faceted policy document intended to help the United States keep its…
Forbes
The Dreck Equation: A Drake Equation For Mapping The Hidden Universe Of Federal Regulation
Joe Biden’s 2024 regulatory big bang—106,109 Federal Register pages—shattered cosmic records. But the 3,000 notice-and-comment rules chronicled there every year and archived in…
Blog
The Dreck Equation: Charting the regulatory cosmos
Most people think of federal regulation as the 3,000 or so rules published each year in the Federal Register and archived in the Code of…
Blog
The year the red tape died? Trump’s 2025 rule count hits historic lows
At the halfway point of 2025, the federal regulatory machinery is running at an unprecedented crawl. That’s good news. As tracked annually in my…
Forbes
Trump’s Deregulation Score: Mid-Year Federal Rules Tally Is The Lowest Ever Recorded
After years of relentless compounding of federal rules and regulations and Federal Register pages–capped by Joe Biden’s self-proclaimed “whole-of-government” executive actions on the likes of DEI, ESG,…
Blog
Trump executive order establishing a portal for regulatory dark matter
Even at the insistence of Congress in 2018, 46 federal agencies could only uncover only about 13,000 of their guidance documents and policy statements…
Blog
Trump’s deregulation shines, but tariffs and antitrust cloud the scene
The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) this month released a new report on the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback efforts. Titled “The Economic…
Blog
Trump’s newborn nest egg accounts
In the face of recurring economic shocks—we’ve suffered 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID-19 in the 21st century alone—the reflex to throw hundreds of…
Blog
DOGE after Musk: From meme to momentum
Elon Musk’s short but headline-grabbing stint with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has concluded, but the broader deregulatory agenda remains robust and far from…
Blog
Deregulation deferred—not defeated—by the Big Beautiful Bill
In my latest Forbes column, I detail how the House-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) had the potential to revolutionize federal regulatory policy. But…
Forbes
How The Big Beautiful Budget Bill Can Deliver Decisive Deregulation
Media coverage of the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB; see committee report) naturally focuses on the spending. And that…
Blog
What the DOGE debates really reveal
Last week I took part in a point/counterpoint on the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), making a brief case for its mission and…