Federal Red Tape Plunges Under Trump

Reason cited CEI’s expert on regulatory activity

“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,” reports the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews in an end-of-year analysis of the Trump administration’s regulatory policies. “Both are levels otherwise not seen since 1993. Notably, 7,648 of those pages are attributable to Biden-era activity before Trump’s inauguration.”

True, the Federal Register is only a rough count of regulatory activity; there are other ways the government imposes red tape on the population. Also, the Administrative Procedure Act requires that a rule be issued to repeal a preexisting rule. Theoretically, you could fatten up the Federal Register with nothing but rule rescissions. But the page count is a good starting point for judging the general direction of regulatory activity.

On that point, Trump offers a real contrast to both his predecessor and his successor in the White House. Prior to the Biden administration, BallotPedia reports, “the Federal Register hit an all-time high of 95,894 pages in 2016” under the presidency of Barack Obama (the Law Librarians Society of Washington D.C. puts it at 97,110 pages). That was the first time it exceeded 90,000 pages. The Biden administration broke a new barrier when it exceeded 100,000 pages in 2024. Of course, the rules those pages represent, offset by whatever “unrules” (delays and rescission) are mixed in, accumulate year after year.

Crews comments that not only is the Federal Register page count down, but “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.” Of the rules issued under Trump, 243 actually began life under Biden and many of the rules issued were unrules delaying or rescinding existing red tape.

Crews doesn’t address the details of rules and rule rescissions issued during Trump’s first year back in office. To wade further into the weeds, see the Brookings Institution, which notes: “As the Trump administration returns to office for a second term with renewed deregulatory ambitions, the executive branch and its agencies are implementing significant policy changes.” Brookings maintains a regulatory tracker which “provides background information and status updates on a curated selection of significant regulatory and deregulatory changes made by the Trump administration.”

So, it looks like the second Trump administration is off to a decent start in keeping its January 2025 promise “to promote prudent financial management and alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens” by ensuring that “for each new regulation issued, at least 10 prior regulations be identified for elimination.”

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