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 returned, or whether regulation affecting sectors ranging from energy to transportation to financial services are merely being rechanneled as “traditional” rules are displaced.

Expectations were high. Four years of expansive whole-of-government regulatory initiatives from the Biden administration on climate, equity, social policy, infrastructure, and technology culminated in the fattest Federal Register ever seen.

Trump 2.0 arrived promising even more aggressive rollback than the first term. That included a freeze of pending Biden regulations, a revived “one-in, ten-out” pledge, the creation of the advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the enactment of more than a dozen congressional resolutions of disapproval zapping certain late-term Biden regulations.

Federal Register page output: Way down

While Biden’s 2024 Federal Register totaled 106,109 pages — the highest in history — the 2025 volume closed the year with “only” 61,461 pages (adjusted for blanks and skips), the lowest seen since Trump’s first-term tally of 61,067. Both are levels otherwise not seen since 1993. Notably, 7,648 of those pages are attributable to Biden-era activity before Trump’s inauguration.

The blunt yardstick of page counts does not measure regulatory burden precisely (nor does anything else, for that matter), but the ebb and flow can reveal governing instincts. Trump’s renewed emphasis on rollback contrasts sharply with Biden’s explicit rejection of regulatory streamlining and it shows, at least as far as conventional rulemakings appearing in the Register are concerned.

Rule counts: Lowest ever

Final rule counts cratered to 2,441 in 2025. That is not only substantially down from Biden’s 3,248 in 2024, it is the lowest total since recordkeeping began in the mid-1970s. Trump bested his own first-term low-water mark of 2,964 rules in 2019.

Moreover, Trump’s “net” total is considerably lower still, as 243 of 2025’s rules are attributable to Biden, and a substantial share of Trump’s own issuances consist of “Unrules” in the form of delays and rescissions.

“Significant” rules and small business effects

Of the rules finalized in 2025, 155 were deemed “significant” by agencies or the Office of Management and Budget, with “Unrules” included among them. This shift is reflected in the administration’s recent claims to have finalized 646 deregulatory actions while adding only five significant ones, for a ratio of 129 rules out for every rule added.

Of 2025’s 2,441 rules, 597 are acknowledged to affect small businesses, compared with 770 in 2024 — again with delays and rollbacks prominent. Thirty small-business rules are classified as significant.

Proposed rules

Meanwhile, federal agencies proposed 1,498 new rules, compared with more than 2,000 during each Obama year. Proposed rules under Trump tend not to be major new regulatory initiatives but repeals, notably of environmental and energy rules.

Paradoxically, as the months roll on, those “deconstructions” could inflate Federal Register page counts as an artifact of the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) requirement that agencies write a rule in order to eliminate one. The administration is experimenting with employing the APA’s “good cause” exemption to eliminate rules without public comment — rather than invoking good cause and public purpose to add them — but so far with limited results.

Limitations of deregulation by decree in 2026

Trump has clearly changed direction. But direction is not destination, and the progressive project can be easily reignited.

Trump 2.0 has leaned heavily on executive orders (225 in all) to reverse Biden’s politicized mandates on climate, DEI, financial disclosure, labor, energy, and more. But regulatory restraint that relies on presidential discretion is fragile, since executive orders can usually (though not always) be rescinded as easily as they are issued.

2026 — and the years ahead

The regulatory state Trump inherited is larger, more complex, and more deeply embedded than the one bequeathed by Barack Obama in 2017. Rollback is possible — and in key respects underway — but it can stall or reverse, and the locus of regulatory intervention can migrate.

The real test ahead is whether deregulation will be made durable by Congress or be left to the whims of the executive officeholder.

Unfortunately for the Trump project, meaningful reform requires more than freezes and ratios. Congress needs to make the “Unrules project” permanent, and to end the laundering of regulation by means other than the conventional rules featured in this roundup. As Congress’s spending balloons, agencies in turn — even under Trump — increasingly rely on the likes of:

• Guidance documents, memoranda and other variants of regulatory dark matter
• Procurement mandates
• Grant conditions
• Federal contracting rules
• Subsidy eligibility criteria

These instruments can function as rule equivalents, often bypassing notice-and-comment requirements and cost accounting. They, along with other examples of Trump’s own “Swamp Things” such as antitrust activism, public-private partnerships, and partial nationalizations of tech companies remain largely untouched by the one-in, ten-out metrics by which we purport to assess “deregulation.”

In 2026 and beyond, a fuller recognition of the true scope of regulatory intervention is necessary — along with restrictions placed not only on executive overreach, but on Congress’s disregard of enumerated powers. That disregard is the engine of the Administrative State. Record-low rules mask a bigger regulatory trap.

For more, see:

“How “Unrules” are powering down the bureaucracy,” CEI

“Beyond Rules: The Dreck Equation for Quantifying Unseen Federal Regulatory Burdens,” Social Science Research Network

“Half of 2025’s public laws are Biden rule killers,” CEI

“Deregulation’s year-end illusion,” CEI

“Small Business Regulation is Cratering: Here’s the Hidden Catch,” Forbes

“Deregulation Frustration: Is ‘Good Cause’ on Pause?” Forbes