One of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to roll back Obama-era regulations and to lift a variety of restrictions put in place by the mammoth bureaucracy that is our federal government.

He stated in the lead-up to the 2016 election that he intended to eliminate two regulations for every new one. To date, the Trump administration is far exceeding that goal, eliminating 13 regulations for every new one.

The Washington Examiner reports:

“We’ve hit 13 to 1,” [Russ Vought, acting budget office director] told a Heritage Foundation conference on federalism. And cutting so many regulations, he added, has saved taxpayers $33 billion. Departments and agencies including the departments of Labor, Education, Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency have led the war on regulations, according to federal reports. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said that President Trump has a builder’s approach to regulations and federalism. “It is the best kind because it is real and it’s born of real world experience,” said the former House member. “The president has it because he had to go and pull a permit to build a building and deal with bureaucracy and doesn’t like that and knows why that impedes growth and impedes development, impedes creativity,” said Mulvaney.

In his article entitled “Trump deregulation boosting our economy – Here’s one example,” Steve Forbes explains this approach in more detail.

Two big things have been propelling the U.S. economy forward in impressive fashion: the 2017 Trump tax cuts and the president’s relentless drive to reduce unnecessary regulations, which are another form of taxation. One example of the president delivering his deregulation promise came in late May when the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Railroad Administration abandoned a costly regulatory proposal issued by President Barack Obama. The measure would have forced private freight railroad carriers to continue operating with two people in a locomotive cab. This proposed Obama, anti-business mandate was always wrongheaded, and its revocation carries important lessons for how best to regulate. It is also a positive development for the sake of a U.S. economy, whose strength is increasingly connected to the efficient movement of goods. E-commerce will only continue to grow as businesses fiercely compete, and America needs a multimodal transportation system to support this. . . . . The Obama proposal was not a serious attempt at promoting safety. Rather it was featherbedding pure and simple at the behest of unions. Ditching the proposal underscores the fact that regulators should embrace outcomes – such as reducing rail accidents – instead of prescriptions when writing rules.

Back in 2017, President Trump gave a speech about deregulation, and at the end, he moved over to two stacks of paper. Each represented federal regulations, the smaller one from 1960, and the towering stacks from today (2017). He then symbolically cut the “red tape” and promised to continue with his deregulation agenda until current regulations are fewer than those in 1960.

Watch:

The video is cued up to the above iconic moment, but his whole 2017 statement on deregulation is well worth watching if you want to start the video at the beginning.

If you are interested in more details about Trump’s ongoing deregulation, the Brookings Institute has a handy deregulation tracking page.



