President Trump has made good and then some on his pledge to slash costly federal regulations, issuing the fewest new rules in recorded history in his first two years, according to a new analysis.
In fact, the efforts by the White House, Office of Management and Budget, and several agencies to cut and reduce the flow of regulations this year have only ever been topped once: by the same Trump team last year.
“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.
Former President Barack Obama’s high was 95,894 in 2016, as he was rushing through new rules before Trump took office. However, both former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had lower pages published in some years than Trump.
In what Crews has dubbed the “Unconstitutionality Index,” Trump has also slashed the percentage of new rules to new laws passed by Congress and signed by Trump, he wrote in a second report issued Monday.
Trump’s 2018 index was 12: 3,367 new rules compared to 291 new laws.
The Index reached 29 under Obama.
“The point, though, is that the unelected personnel of agencies do the bulk of lawmaking in America, not Congress — no matter the party in power,” he said in the report.
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