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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…