Trump’s deregulation meets invisible rulemaking: The real 2026 challenge

After a brief shutdown, most fiscal year 2026 appropriations have been enacted, despite continued debate over Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding. We may soon see the usual springtime stirrings of a budget resolution setting “envelope” spending levels for fiscal year 2027; alternatively, appropriations bills may proceed individually.

Those envelopes remain enormous: the Congressional Budget Office projects 2025 outlays landing at $7.0 trillion and a deficit of $1.9 trillion, with both price tags more stratospheric than NASA’s Artemis.

Spending is only half the tale of government intervention; regulation is the other. Spending is visible and countable, if onerous. Regulation is hidden and more insidious; its burdens often denied.

To better illuminate regulation, I submitted the 2026 draft of Ten Thousand Commandments last week for copyedit and layout. In addition to trillions in annual costs, as always, the report catalogs what most people think of as regulation: the thousands of annual rules issued through notice-and-comment rulemaking and published in the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations.

In the Office of Management and Budget’s “Final Accounting” report on Executive Order 14192 (“Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation”) and under its one-in, ten-out directive, agencies are declared to have issued 646 deregulatory actions and five significant regulatory actions in 2025, yielding a ratio of 129 to 1.

Those cuts are estimated to save about $212 billion in regulatory costs. Sounds awesome. But three rules alone account for over 80 percent of the declared savings. One of those three is the claimed savings from keeping one’s shoes on at the airport (thanks DHS).

This is revelatory. Saving $212 billion is great, to be sure. But keeping one’s socks clean can hardly be considered anything close to deconstruction of the administrative state.

Cost-saving exercises like Trump’s are vital, but they reveal something more important. Much — perhaps most — of federal regulatory intervention occurs outside formal rulebook channels. This unbooked regulatory “deficit” amounts to a corollary of government red ink, but one far less disciplined, if that can be imagined.

The key lesson of EO 14192 for 2026 and the years ahead is that regulatory analysis must now account for the abysses beyond formal rule counts.

The roughly 3,000 rules agencies issue each year (apart from Trump-era dips below that level in 2025 and 2019) represent only a sliver of the administrative state’s actual footprint. Surrounding them is a much larger universe of “rule equivalents:” guidance documents, policy statements, memoranda, procurement conditions, grant strings, subsidies, public-private partnership provisions, and other mechanisms that shape behavior without going through the traditional rulemaking process.

This is regulatory dark matter. It increasingly outweighs visible, discrete rules and grows in lockstep with that $7 trillion-and-counting spending budget.

In an attempt to shine light on the chaos of dark matter, so to speak, I cooked up the Dreck Equation as a way to make this invisible universe discussable, if not yet precisely measurable. Inspired loosely by Frank Drake’s famous equation estimating the number of communicating extraterrestrial civilizations out in the cosmos, the Dreck Equation treats the numbers of rules as a probabilistic construct rather than a simple tally. A simplified version looks like this:

Dreck Load = Rules + (Guidance Documents × β) + (Contracts × β₁) + (Subsidies/Grants × β₂)

“Rules” refers to the cardinal number of final rules published annually in the Federal Register, compiled yearly in Ten Thousand Commandments. The Greek letters, however, represent probabilities—how often guidance documents and stipulations contained in contracts, procurement requirements, subsidy and grant conditions quietly translate into the equivalent of binding rules in practice.

Some guidance is informational, with β close to zero. Other guidance is treated by regulated parties as mandatory, with a gravitational pull approaching that of formal rules, pushing β closer to 1.0.

I expect the Dreck Equation to figure more prominently in future editions of Ten Thousand Commandments. It practically forces itself upon us. Real-world dreck in action includes the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s $42 billion BEAD broadband program, where procurement and grant conditions substitute for rulemaking, and Biden-era Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion directives that operated through memoranda and funding leverage rather than statute.

The 2026 Ten Thousand Commandments draft laid groundwork by expanding the discussion of regulatory dark matter and referencing agencies’ laudable — but incomplete — disclosure efforts. The Dreck Equation is not a finished metric, nor does it pretend to have impossible precision. After all, rules themselves are not comparable units.

Its purpose is more basic: to stop pretending that notice-and-comment rulemaking encompasses regulation.

For policymakers, including Trump, the implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. A regime with fewer formal rules can remain deeply interventionist if dreck accumulates unchecked. Conversely, meaningful deregulation requires more than trimming the Federal Register (as Trump is unquestionably doing). It requires recognizing and lowering the “β” on guidance, contracts, grants, and other off-book controls.

While federal spending can be measured precisely, Ten Thousand Commandments has always been more about what we don’t know regarding regulatory burdens than what we do know. The Dreck Equation is a next step in that endeavor.

Budget reconciliations are contentious but common; reconciling regulation with limited government is even more difficult. Real transparency and reform now require examining the hidden math behind the cosmos of regulatory dark matter.