Washington Examiner:

"At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump's regulatory reform project going? Better than Obama, Bush II, and Clinton in terms of fewer regulations; but not as good as Trump's own first year," said the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

CEI regulations guru Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. said in a year-end report provided in advance to Secrets that Trump ended the year with 3,367 new regulations. That is the lowest since records were first kept in the 1970s.

But Crews noted that Trump's number of new regulations is lower. The reason: the government requires a "regulation" to kill a regulation, and Trump is continuing on his promise to kill two regulations for every new one he proposes.

"Obama's own lowest count was 3,410, not much more than Trump's new score. But fewer of Obama's rules would be expected to have been devoted to rollbacks of prior initiatives, the emphasis of Trump's 'one-in, two-out' executive order," said Crews, CEI's vice president for policy.

"The Federal Register closed out 2018 with 3,367 final rules in all. The only lower count was 3,281 under Trump a year ago, which was the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s," he added.

Federal Register pages are also way down, winning praise from corporate America and consumers.

Under Trump the daily list of pages totaled 61,308 in 2017 and 68,082 this year.