Trump’s Regulatory Reform Is Promising: Regulation Growth is Just 1/20th That of Obama’s

We recently took a look at how President Trump is actually keeping many of his campaign promises regarding immigration, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. And it looks like he’s on a roll, especially when it comes to regulatory reform.

According to a new analysis from the American Action Forum (AAF), the addition of new regulations under President Trump is significantly smaller in scale than compared to those imposed in the first six months under former President Obama.

Compared to the Obama Administration, the Trump Administration has imposed: 1/20th of the lifetime costs, 1/11th of the annual costs, and 1/8th of the paperwork. With nearly 6 million fewer paperwork burden hours, that amounts to the workload savings of roughly 3,000 full-time employees.

President Trump’s administration is saving billions of dollars just by not increasing the regulatory burden. This is welcome news.

With regards to regulatory volume, the Trump administration also has dramatically decreased the number of rules reviewed by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

The Trump administration has set record lows for approving rules, by concluding only 41 rules for OIRA reviews and designating only 16 of those being “economically significant.” For comparison, the previous lowest numbers were from 2001, and they were 180 and 28 rules, respectively.

Unfortunately, deregulation cannot be done by President Trump alone—Congress must also get involved. However, the administration did post savings of $207 million (annualized), and as the AAF points out, the adminitration could hypothetically achieve much more:

It’s important to note that part of the issue with deregulatory rulemakings is that they must generally undergo the same process as regulatory rulemakings: issue a proposed rule, solicit and consider comments, and then publish a finalized version. This process takes time, often months to even years. However, there have been notable developments outside of the first six months of purely administrative actions.

Sadly, most of the proposed deregulation (Obamacare and tax reform) has to come from Congress. Although there are some rays of hope: together, Congress and President Trump have passed 14 Congressional Review Act (CRA) “resolutions of disapproval” together. These resolutions themselves will save $1.1 billion annually.

Congress is also trying to push through another resolution to stop a rule that itself would cost $380 million.

Additionally, President Trump has initiated a review of rules that together cost $55.1 billion in total regulatory burden.

Regulatory reform certainly wasn’t a ‘hot button’ issue during the 2016 election, but it was an important one to fulfill.

So far, the Trump administration is doing just that.