Trump Spring Regulatory Agenda Back on Track After Virus Pause
Bloomberg Law cites CEI’s annual 10,000 Commandments report:
A report released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian public policy organization, is the latest to show the administration has been moving to regulate more—not less—over the successive years Trump has been in office.
That analysis supports the conclusions of a report last year by the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center showing more planned regulatory actions than deregulatory ones, along with a review of regulatory cost increases in 2019 by the American Action Forum.
CEI’s report shows that the Trump administration started an aggressive deregulation campaign in 2017 by freezing pending rules, using the Congressional Review Act to cut Obama-era regulations, and slowing the pace of new rulemakings. Yet 2019 told a different story.
According to the fall 2019 unified agenda, agencies had 3,752 regulatory actions at various stages of implementation, CEI’s report said. Of those, just 689 were designated as deregulatory.
“While the Trump administration can be said to have technically met the goal of implementing a ‘one-in, two-out’ process for federal regulations over the past three years taken as a whole, the longer-term horizon plainly shows agencies poised to reverse this and to issue substantially more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones,” the report said.
In terms of savings, EPA’s Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule alone is estimated to save $200 billion through reduced regulatory costs and less expensive vehicles for consumers, making it “the biggest deregulatory action of our lifetime,” OMB’s Jennings said.
“Anyone suggesting that President Trump has slowed in his deregulation effort has been asleep at the wheel,” Jennings said.