Deregulation’s year-end illusion
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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 exclusive Fox News story, the administration claims to have “blown far past” its one-in, ten-out goals by finalizing 646 deregulatory actions while adding only five significant regulatory actions.
If solid, the ratio would stand at 129 out to every one rule in. The administration also claims net present value dollar savings of $212 billion.
A handful of deregulatory moves were noted, with just three accounting for more than 80 percent of the claimed dollar savings. The largest ($129 billion) comes from the FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department) Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirement Revision that eliminated the requirement for certain U.S. businesses (such as LLCs and corporations) to disclose personal details about owners and controllers to FinCEN
The two other heavily weighted changes were the Transportation Security Administration’s decision to allow air passengers to keep their shoes on during security screening (for a claimed $25 billion in savings), and a Food and Drug Administration rollback of a rule that had classified laboratory-developed tests as medical devices subject to extensive review and reporting requirements ($20 billion).
Supporting documentation for the remaining 600-plus deregulatory moves was not released alongside the announcement in a manner comparable to the first Trump term’s “Final Accounting” reports. The Fall Unified Agenda—which then, and now, could be used to substantiate such claims—has yet to appear, although a significant portion could likely be inferred from the Spring Unified Agenda by the adventurous. The White House did note, however, that “across the executive branch, agencies rescinded costly, discriminatory DEI requirements [and] refocused on core missions.”
To be sure, recent deregulation is not imaginary. Congress has enacted more than a dozen resolutions of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act overturning Biden-era rules, and agencies have moved to withdraw or rethink numerous proposed regulations, including major Environmental Protection Agency initiatives that stretched statutory authority.
In a mid-year article, I suggested that 2025 could be dubbed the year of the “Unrule,” since large-scale conventional regulatory enactments are no longer part of the picture. That still holds. As of today, the Federal Register contains “only” 2,389 rules, which will make this year’s tally the lowest by far.
In describing the Trump-era unrules phenomenon, I noted that a significant share of finalized actions consisted of rule delays, withdrawals, rescissions, and allowances for enforcement discretion. These, along with repeals of guidance documents, are likely what make up most of the 600 claimed cuts. What many reformers hope to see instead are more substantive repeals of binding regulations than what has been documented so far. Keeping our shoes on will not satisfy those expecting a genuine deconstruction of the administrative state.
So yes: the White House and agency heads deserve credit for the effective freeze in conventional rulemaking we currently enjoy, along with the documented rollbacks. Ultimately, though, the right question is not whether Washington counted fewer rules, but whether it governed less. On that score, the ground is shakier.
Counting notice-and-comment rules captures only a fraction of the federal government’s regulatory footprint. Today’s administrative state increasingly governs through mechanisms that may never appear in the Federal Register at all.
Agencies rely heavily on guidance documents, procurement conditions, grant requirements, subsidies, and public-private partnerships to steer behavior—often tied to the deployment of hundreds of billions of federal dollars. Trump is as adept at using these instruments as any progressive, and they can offset deregulatory progress. His moves on price controls, tariffs, and industrial steering—up to and including partial nationalization efforts involving firms like Intel—are the showcase examples.
These instruments function as rule equivalents—binding in practice, yet insulated from the transparency, cost analysis, and procedural discipline that formal rulemaking is supposed to entail. They also go uncounted in one-in, ten-out tallies.
That dynamic creates a year-end illusion. Rule counts can fall even as regulatory pressure rises.
The Trump administration has reduced rule output in unprecedented fashion while expanding industrial policy and federal steering more generally. These swamp things—also present during Trump 1.0—do not always show up in rule tallies, but they entrench government control just as effectively, and sometimes more so. They will also be harder to unwind, because they amount to gifts to future progressive administrations whose long-standing ambition has been to control corporate America from Washington.
We can celebrate what we’re seeing in terms of cuts and freezes in conventional regulation. But in today’s America, that narrow focus risks encouraging precisely the behavior reformers should oppose: the laundering of regulation through other channels.
Policymakers in 2026 need to ask not just how many rules were issued or repealed, but how much effective regulation was imposed across all federal instruments. Deregulation must be about more than optics—optics that grow increasingly superficial as the federal government expands.
For more, see:
“Rise Of The Unrule: Fewer Rules, Fewer Agencies, And No Apocalypse,” Forbes
“Washington just bought Intel—and sold capitalism,” Competitive Enterprise Institute
“Half of 2025’s public laws are Biden rule killers,” Competitive Enterprise Institute