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 a new Forbes column. Biden’s order never promoted genuine competition. Instead, it expanded Washington’s reach into the economy, branding more regulation as “competition” in true Orwellian fashion.

Rather than promoting competition, Biden’s order increased federal control of already heavily regulated sectors like agriculture, airlines, broadband, banking, health care, and technology. The Biden order even coaxed nominally independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission into expanded antitrust and price-control schemes.

A few deregulatory moves happened in the Biden administration, including over-the-counter hearing aids. Yet regulatory policies greatly outweighed these welcome changes.

Biden claimed to be a “proud capitalist,” but he treated government as both architect and referee of markets. That made winners out of entrenched regulators, politically connected corporations and cronies; not consumers or entrepreneurs.

Trump’s new order, “Revocation of Executive Order on Competition,” is refreshingly brief: it revokes Biden’s directive in seemingly as few words as the English language allows. The whole of section 1 reads:

Revocation. Executive Order 14036 of July 9, 2021 (Promoting Competition in the American Economy), is hereby revoked.

While Trump has ended the formal framework for the Biden-era competition policy — which even included a Competition Council! — that doesn’t erase the fundamental extensive powers federal agencies still hold. That means the next progressive administration can revive the same approaches and will likely be inclined to do so even more aggressively than Biden did.

For lasting change, Congress must tackle the big issues: abolishing departments and agencies, imposing stronger checks on rulemaking, and basically dismantling decades of accumulated regulatory centralization.

So far, while lawmakers have overturned some Biden rules under the Congressional Review Act, they have not enacted broad reforms to shrink the administrative state.

And Trump himself is not immune to swampy impulses that CEI has detailed in so many publications. Tariffs, antitrust interventions, drug price controls, and other top-down economic measures all will serve as the basis for future progressive power grabs if agency dismantling does not occur.

Revoking Biden’s bogus and misnamed competition order is a win, but the bigger goal remains clear: sustained, full-throated deregulation that expands space for free enterprise and prevents both parties from using the state to steer markets.

For more, see:

“Trump Revokes Biden’s Competition Executive Order,” Forbes

“How Biden’s Executive Order On Promoting Competition Instead Consolidates Government Power,” Forbes

“Biden’s Competition Council Targets Free Enterprise, Expands Government,” Forbes