Trump Regulatory Chief Hits Ground Running for ‘Fundamental Shift’

Government Executive discusses the Trump administration’s release of the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions with Wayne Crews, author of 10,000 Commandments.

Nine days after she was confirmed by the Senate, President Trump’s regulatory chief presided over the release of a mandatory forecast of upcoming rule-making and touted savings from cutting red tape as of the administration’s six-month anniversary.

Neomi Rao, a former George Mason University law professor, rolled out the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ semiannual Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions on Thursday after telling reporters that the preview is “the beginning of a kind of fundamental regulatory reform and a reorientation of where we’re going with regulation.”

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The new agenda was welcomed by Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the free-market-oriented Competitive Enterprise Institute. “People who favor a slowdown in regulation are going to be pleased,” he told Government Executive, pointing to the number of regulatory actions expected in the next year. At 1,732, that number is a 20 percent drop from Obama’s final uniform agenda.

Trump’s raw numbers are “roughly in line with what you saw at a comparable time in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations—a few thousand economically significant rules a year,” Crews said. But his center still needs to “tease through” the rules to see which ones have a deregulatory focus, and Trump’s “overall total number of rules is lower than Obama’s,” while the number of pages in the Federal Register is about a third as high as last year, Crews added.

Read the full article at Government Executive.