The Great Rules Rollback

The Wall Street Journal covers deregulation under the Trump administration.

Amid the debate over tweets and tax reform, perhaps the most significant change brought by the first year of the Trump Presidency has been overlooked: reining in and rolling back the regulatory state at a pace faster than even Ronald Reagan. This is a major reason for the acceleration of animal spirits and faster economic growth in the past year.

A rules rollback is harder than it sounds because the inertial tendency of bureaucracies is to expand, and the modern administrative state has expanded almost inexorably under presidents of both parties. New rules are published in the Federal Register, and Barack Obama presided over six of the seven highest annual page counts ever. In 2016 his regulators left town with a record-breaking binge of 95,894 new pages, according to Wayne Crews, who tracks the administrative state for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

George W. Bush wasn’t much better. His Administration added 79,435 pages in 2008, its most expansive regulatory year. By contrast in the first year of the Trump Presidency through Sept. 30, 45,678 pages were added to the Federal Register. Many were required to follow-up on legislation and rules from the Obama era, so the Trump trend is even better.

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal.