Trump’s deregulation shines, but tariffs and antitrust cloud the scene

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) this month released a new report on the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback efforts. Titled “The Economic Benefits of Current Deregulatory Policies,” the CEA report quantifies certain gains from unwinding the Biden-era regulatory agenda—up to $907 billion present value in avoided costs, or more than $10,600 per family of four.

The Trump administration’s 10-to-1 rule-cutting directive—eliminating ten regulations for every new one—features prominently in the report. Trump has been active, issuing 164 executive orders so far plus memoranda and other decrees.

Among all of those, at least 20 presidential actions specifically promote regulatory reform (a subset of which invoke or instruct the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE).

The CEA covers how these actions include rescinding burdensome rules, scrapping DEI programs, removing barriers to energy production, rolling back constraints on AI and digital asset innovation, and more. These measures chip away at the 188,000 pages of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and stand to offer real relief to families and businesses and promote economic health.

As I note at Forbes, even as this deregulatory work accelerates, some of the administration’s own tendencies threaten to undercut both the message and momentum. Tariffs on goods and raw materials, revived antitrust campaigns, and interference in concert ticket pricing all risk replacing Biden’s form of economic and social micromanagement with other variants of coercive interventionism.

If markets are to thrive, the broader lesson is that notice-and-comment regulation from progressives isn’t the only burden and source of administrative overreach—discordant interventionist instincts in a nominally deregulatory-minded administration can be just as costly. To fully realize the benefits outlined by the CEA, the administration must apply the same discipline to its broader trade and competition policy as it does to streamlining of the CFR.

For more, see:

“Council Of Economic Advisers Highlights Trump’s Rule-Cutting In New Report,” Forbes