Scaling deregulation: Can Trump achieve a 10-for-1 rule elimination?

In a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Donald Trump pledged if re-elected to eliminate—not two rules for every one added as he had during his first term—but ten for one. As I explore in Forbes (“Trump’s Ten Rules Out For Every One Rule In: How Would That Work?”), this cannot work through conventional approaches to regulatory reform.

Lessons from the first term: Congressional support is key

During Trump’s first term, his Executive Order 13,771 (Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs) launched the elimination of two rules for every new significant regulatory action. This two-for-one policy got off to an impressive start, with a White House claim of a 22-to-1 ratio of eliminated rules early on. Naturally, further gains became harder to achieve as time passed, but goals were met.

Trump’s first-term efforts largely depended on executive branch solo action. To carry out the new ambitions in a second term, a stronger congressional partnership as well as an assortment of legislative reforms to eliminate outdated regulations en masse and to establish a more formal regulatory cost budget will be necessary. It’s a long story, but regulatory costs budgets are largely a Democratic idea so the GOP can take them up on it.

To succeed in his new ten-for-one agenda, a Trump team would need to execute on several fronts.

Reinstate deregulatory executive orders jettisoned by Biden: Biden reversed Trump’s deregulatory program, mostly on his first day in office, including the one-in, two-out initiative and orders addressing sub-regulatory guidance documents. Reinstating these should be the first move, along with unraveling Biden’s own pen-and-phone unilateral moves on the likes of misbegotten competition policy interventions including price controls, net zero energy policies, and coercive and discriminatory equity programs that preclude limited government.  

Rapid use of the Congressional Review Act: During his first term, Trump leveraged the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to roll back late-stage Obama-era rules. Reaching the new target will require an even more aggressive program to eliminate Biden’s unwelcome “whole-of-government” regulatory transformations that are subject to rollback.

Overhaul formal OMB regulatory oversight: Biden’s Executive Order 14,094 (Modernizing Regulatory Review) and changes to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Circular A-4 guidance to agencies on regulatory review shield more rules from scrutiny. Trump would need to restore OMB’s defanged watchdog role and challenge progressive premises and ensure more stringent regulatory review. If this cannot be achieved, OMB must be stripped of its regulatory review function and the job placed with Congress (as detailed in testimony I provided to the House Committee on Administration in July).

Targeting regulatory dark matter: Regulations come not only from notice-and-comment rulemaking but also from sub-regulatory guidance and other informal decrees we collectively refer to as regulatory dark matter. Trump’s first term not only rendered this morass visible for the first time, but also hinted at the potential for eliminating these burdens. The elimination of the abuse of guidance documents and other informal decrees will play an essential role in Trump’s plan, particularly given that these are emergent sources of regulatory complexity.

End federal subsidies and public-private partnerships, and drain the tidal wave of  contracting and procurement: Cutting off subsidies and drastically reducing federal contracts that further the regulatory agenda will be essential to shrinking the state’s reach, as these total in the many hundreds of billions of dollars annually and, increasingly, can be governed by dark matter and executive decree. Recent legislation like the inflation and infrastructure laws and the CHIPS and Science Act have escalated these concerns and bolstered the regulatory state to an unappreciated degree. Much of the progressive agenda is advanced through subsidies, public-private partnerships, and federal contracting. Downsizing these channels is just as critical as eliminating rules.

Eliminate not just programs but departments and agencies: To meet the goal of ten-for-one, Trump would need to go beyond the world of discrete regulations and guidance documents and start eliminating entire departments and agencies. It would be necessary to go beyond any “mere” Musk-style Efficiency Commission to fundamentally reduce the government’s scope and, in turn, its regulatory output. We should not fall into the trap of making the central government “efficient” at things it ought not be doing in the first place. There are lessons to be learned from Trump’s first-term executive branch restructuring project, which eliminated no agencies.

Conclusion: Be Prepared, Scouts

Streamlining deregulation under the Administrative Procedure Act is slow, and Trump’s team will need to be prepared for pushback. Any large-scale deregulation will face litigation, as evidenced by the numerous legal challenges to Trump’s first-term actions. A new administration must be prepared to navigate these obstacles more efficiently. Trump’s ten-for-one pledge is bold, but with the right legal strategy, congressional support, and aggressive use of deregulatory tools, this ambitious goal may be within reach.

For more: See “Trump’s Ten Rules Out For Every One Rule In: How Would That Work?” Forbes