In its final 16 days, the Obama administration pushed through regulations costing a whopping $24.8 billion, or over $1.55 billion a day, leaving a spending hangover that the Trump administration is still trying to deal with.

By comparison, a new year-end report on regulations from American Action Forum found that in the subsequent 11 months, President Trump and his team have imposed just $5.8 billion in new regulations, or about $16.8 million a day.

“The trend of regulatory activity shifted dramatically in 2017 once President Trump assumed the presidency,” said the review by AAF’s Dan Bosch, director of regulatory policy, and research analyst Dan Goldbeck.

“What is most noteworthy is the disparity in the regulatory activity of the last three weeks of the Obama administration versus the more than 11 months of the Trump administration. Despite substantial new regulatory costs finalized in the last weeks of the Obama administration, the Trump administration made significant progress in slowing this growth the remainder of the year. In fact, 81 percent of all regulatory costs finalized in 2017 came during President Obama’s final weeks in office,” they wrote in the review provided to Secrets.

The numbers appear startling.

“Of the $30.6 billion in finalized costs last year, $24.8 billion came from 38 rules published from January 3-19, 2017, in the waning days of the Obama administration,” they determined. For Trump’s full year the cost has ben $5.8 billion.

Trump campaigned on a promise to cut two regulations for every new one imposed and to slash costs. In part by targeting pending Obama regulations, his administration’s ratio of cuts to new regulations was 16 to 1.

AAF also said that the number of “finalized rules” was the lowest since 2005.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com