Trump’s Deregulatory Project Gets Mixed Grade in New Report

Bloomberg Law cites CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews on the release of his new report, the 2026 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments.

The price tag of federal regulations remained $2.2 trillion in 2025, or 7% of US gross domestic product—effectively unchanged from the Biden era, Crews found.

The report suggests Trump underestimated how deeply entrenched institutional structures are, constantly creating new regulations and stymieing the president’s promise to enact “the largest regulatory reduction in the history of our country,” as he vowed on the campaign trail in October 2024.

“Trump’s regulatory streamlining has not actually translated into governing less,” Crews wrote. “As during Trump’s first term, regulation does not necessarily disappear.”

Part of the problem is Trump himself. Executive-driven deregulation is limited “when the presumed streamliner is himself a transaction-oriented interventionist rather than a committed deregulator,” Crews wrote, referring to Trump.

Read more at Bloomberg Law