Under Trump, Focus Shifts to Scrapping Regulations

The Hill discusses deregulation under President Trump with Wayne Crews.

Federal agencies have shifted their focus under the Trump administration from writing regulations to getting rid of them.

In just the past few days, the Education Department said it is working to redo two Obama-era rules aimed at reining in for-profit colleges, the Food and Drug Administration indefinitely delayed new rules to overhaul nutrition facts labels and the Consumer Product Safety Commission asked the public to suggest ways it can reduce the burdens and costs of its existing rules.

President Trump said during the campaign that “70 percent of regulations can go,” and he quickly issued a moratorium on new rules after taking office, bringing the work of regulators to a halt.

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Advocates of deregulation say it’s hard at this point to gauge if Trump is succeeding in paring down the regulatory rulebook.

“When you try to eliminate a rule that’s also a rule,” said Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). “That’s a thing that makes measurement difficult right now.”

Still, Crews said the number of proposed and final rules put forward under Trump is down from past administrations.

CEI released stats earlier this week showing a 7 percent decrease in rules under the Trump administration compared to the Obama administration during the same period of time — Jan. 20 to June 7, 2016.

When President Reagan took office, Crews said final rules and pages in Federal Register dropped by more than a third; there hasn’t been a decline as significant since.

“It’s yet to be seen what the ultimate success of his executive actions will be,” Crews said of Trump. “In order for things to be sustained there needs to be bipartisan action.”

Read the full article at The Hill.