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 in the Federal Register. That’s a milestone even by Trump standards—his previous record-low was 2,964 in 2019 and a straight linear projection implies “only” 2,558 final rules will be published by the end of the year.

Not only that; 243 of this year’s final rules were Biden’s January issue, leaving Trump a projected “net” of just 2,315 for 2025.

 What we’re witnessing is the rise of the “Unrule,” something of a revolt against the machinery of the administrative state. As I noted in Forbes, many of the so-called rules that have appeared this year aren’t new mandates at all. They’re reversals, delays, withdrawals—and a government-wide recognition that certain, perhaps most, regulations are not merely unjustified but actively harmful.

The rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare is a signature example, which was the pre-Lee Zeldin EPA’s way of exercising remorseless control over the entire economy. 

Under Trump 2.0, only 76 of the 1,518 rules so far have been deemed “significant.” And even this subset is dominated by mop-up of progressive activists’ messes via relief in the form of long-overdue rescissions, narrowed reporting mandates, postponements, and enforcement retreats. More broadly, agencies are being defunded and downsized with an aim toward termination. Guidance documents and sub-regulatory decrees that can bypass or substitute for notice-and-comment rulemaking are in the crosshairs as well.

The bureaucracy is hitting pause, and nothing is breaking that is not dependent on government slush, favor, or dollars  residing in an unearned Beltway McMansion. These executive branch changes provide a big lesson for a Congress, whose action is needed for a thorough deconstruction. When the bureaucracy is put in time out, nobody misses it except the vast industry surrounding it. The economy, jobs, and public health and safety get a boost. Congress now should take the baton from the administration and defund bureaucracy, restrict and prevent its operations, and work to abolish it. It should have been done ages ago, and the recent $9 billion rescission package is barely a scratch, although it did step on some noisy tracheas.

This is not to suggest Trump is any sort of free-market purist. He has shown plenty of appetite for intervention on tariffs, antitrust, AI, entertainment venue pricing restrictions, and other swampy things.

But something remarkable is happening in 2025 that cannot be ignored. It turns out the federal government doesn’t have to issuenew rules constantly. And despite the rule drought and the left’s claims of administrative chaos, the world keeps turning. Turns out the bureaucracy was the chaos all along.

Still, the Rise of the Unrule, the return to normalcy, and the restoration of constitutionally-limited government remains fragile, vulnerable to being upended by a new administration that reverts to the rampaging whole-of-government regulatory campaigns of the Biden administration. The Trump administration and Congress could help avert that by giving “Unrules” prominence in the Federal Register and the “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions,” normalizing regulatory rollback and boosting transparency that would make odious future slides into progressive rulemaking fevers even more public.

This moment offers a rare opportunity—not just to deregulate, but to rethink what regulation should mean in a constitutional republic. If most new rules can be paused or undone without crisis, perhaps many should never have existed at all. Same goes for the agencies that, until this year, had been pumping them out like hotcakes.

For more, see my article at Forbes: “Rise Of The Unrule: Fewer Rules, Fewer Agencies, And No Apocalypse”