Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney said in a statement that government "is using muscles it hasn’t used in a really long time, exposing and removing redundant and unnecessary regulation.” | Drew Angerer/Getty Images White House trumpets early success in wiping out regulations Trump's agencies have withdrawn or postponed hundreds of regulatory actions that the Obama administration had in the works late in 2016, OMB says.

The White House released its first official scorecard Thursday on the administration's progress in taking a wrecking ball to former President Barack Obama's regulatory legacy, saying it has shelved or postponed hundreds of pending rules with many more on the chopping block.

"By amending and eliminating regulations that are ineffective, duplicative, and obsolete, the Administration can promote economic growth and innovation and protect individual liberty," the White House Office of Management and Budget said as it posted the rundown Thursday morning, formally known as the Unified Agenda. It called its steps so far "the beginning of fundamental regulatory reform and a reorientation toward reducing unnecessary regulatory burden on the American people."


The anti-regulation push is perhaps the greatest success so far of Donald Trump's presidency — a contrast to the resistance he's faced on repealing Obamacare, restricting immigration, rewriting the tax code or building a border wall.

Liberal watchdog groups accused the administration of putting corporate profits ahead of the public's interests.

"The only winners from this Unified Agenda are the corporate interests whose deregulatory wish lists the administration has adopted wholesale," said Amit Narang, a regulatory policy expert at Public Citizen. "Anyone who believes in protecting public health, safety, infrastructure security and the environment will be outraged by this radical overreach in repealing regulations."

Trump's agencies have withdrawn 469 regulatory actions that the Obama administration had in the works late in 2016, while pushing 391 others back for "further careful review," OMB said Thursday.

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Among other details released Thursday, the Interior Department said it plans to publish a proposal this month to rescind Obama-era restrictions for fracking on public land, while the Environmental Protection Agency is planning a December unveiling of its proposal to rewrite a sweeping water and wetlands regulation. And while Trump has already vowed to kill Obama's landmark climate regulations for power plants, Thursday's listing outlined the legal grounds that the EPA intends to cite — that the rules exceeded the agency's "statutory authority."

OMB also boasted that the new administration has proposed astronomically fewer rules than Obama did during his early days in office. It estimated that Trump's regulatory actions through last month will reduce economic burdens by $22 million a year — in contrast with more than $3 billion in annual burdens that Obama's agencies had imposed as of the same point in 2009.

The new regulations the Trump administration is envisioning include one requiring the Department of Homeland Security to return immigrants crossing the border illegally "to the territory from which they came" pending removal proceedings, as well as one permitting a biometric exit system at all ports of entry.

Other rules would change the way employers can distribute tips to their workers — rescinding the Obama administration's restrictions — and reconsider a regulation on electronic records of workplace injuries or illness.

OMB says many more efforts to ease the burden of rules are in the works. For example, it said, the Department of Transportation is preparing to offer passenger railroads "greater flexibility" in meeting crashworthiness standards, while the Labor Department will streamline approvals for apprenticeship programs and the EPA will abandon "a costly and premature plan to regulate oil and gas development" on certain Indian reservations.

Trump has made it clear that erasing regulations is one of the prime missions he has set for his administration. With his legislative agenda stalled, administration officials are increasingly looking toward deregulation as an issue they can sell to his base ahead of the midterm elections.

“Government is using muscles it hasn’t used in a really long time, exposing and removing redundant and unnecessary regulation,” OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said in a statement.

Liberals have been increasingly dismayed by Trump's anti-regulation push, meanwhile. But Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor who has tracked regulations for decades, said the courts will have the final say for many of those attempts. And so will the bureaucratic process.

"In order to replace Obama rules with far weaker requirements, Trump will need to do a whole rulemaking," Steinzor said. She added, "It takes years to slog through to a final rule unless they decide to fast track it."

Public Citizen's Narang said Thursday that deregulation "has led to historic disasters such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf, the Wall Street meltdown that led to the Great Recession and, most recently in the U.K., the Grenfell Tower fire.

"What this Unified Agenda makes clear is that, at the behest of big corporations, the Trump administration is laying the foundation for a new wave of deregulatory disasters," he added.

The product that OMB released Thursday is the Trump administration's first update of the Unified Agenda, a twice-a-year compilation of planned or expected regulatory actions across the executive branch.

The agenda normally attracts little attention from the media or the public, but Trump has placed special emphasis on the "deregulatory" part of its name and mission. A more complete version of the Unified Agenda will be released in the fall, when agencies may have a better handle on how to carry out Trump's policies — including a mandate that they repeal two regulations for every new one they propose.

The Obama White House's final Unified Agenda included more than 3,300 regulatory actions, including 193 it deemed "economically significant." The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs defines an economically significant regulation as a rule that could have an effect on the economy of $100 million or more.