Deregulation Under Trump: Despite claims of broad deregulation, the administrations hallmark, has been little regulatory activity.

• Author: Belton, Keith B.
• Position: REGULATORY REFORM

Donald Trump seems determined to go down in history as a deregulator. This is surprising because no other post-World War II president--except perhaps Ronald Reagan--has exhibited such public commitment to this cause.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump took a stark and distinctive stance on the modern administrative state. He advocated widespread deregulation of the U.S. economy. It was a central plank of his national economic and energy plans as outlined in major speeches in Detroit (August 8, 2016) and Pittsburgh (September 22, 2016). He called for both a moratorium on new regulations and an explicit process of review and repeal of unnecessary regulations, which some advisers referred to as "deconstruction of the administrative state." Since entering office, he has frequently revisited those themes.

Has President Trump's performance matched his rhetoric? We conducted a review of his administration's deregulatory efforts as of the end of his second year in office. We interviewed dozens of regulatory experts, conducted a literature review, and undertook analysis of governmental data. We did this to answer three questions:

* Has the administration curbed the flow of new regulations, thereby slowing the growth of the stock of regulation?

* Has the administration worked with the Republican-majority Congress to repeal or scale back the existing stock of regulations?

* Using executive power, has the administration repealed or revised existing regulations to be less burdensome or intrusive?

In the field of presidential studies, these questions relate to presidential effectiveness, not presidential virtue or policy desirability. In assessing the Trump record, we have not evaluated the economic, public health, social, or environmental effects of his deregulatory agenda. Thus, we take no stance on whether the agenda as a whole or any specific deregulatory action is good for the United States or the world. We do not take a side in the ongoing argument over the magnitude of the change in welfare brought about by Trump's deregulatory efforts. Rather, we simply want to determine if, and to what extent, he followed through on his stated ambitions.

MOTIVATION AND METRICS

The Trump administration sees regulation as an intrusion on the freedoms of private citizens and enterprises. This perspective is closely connected to a conservative legal philosophy that is gaining favor within the Federalist Society and conservative think tanks. President Trump's initial White House general counsel, Donald McGahn, made a pointed claim to a sympathetic audience that "the ever-growing, unaccountable administrative state is a direct threat to individual liberty." Both of Trump's appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have expressed concerns about the immense powers of the modern administrative state. Relatedly, the administration is working to ensure regulators do not exceed their statutory authority when issuing regulations and Trump's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) expects agencies to implement the best reading of the statute, not merely a reasonable one.

This non-economic rationale for deregulation helps explain why the Trump administration may favor deregulation in specific instances even when regulated businesses, pro-business Republicans, or professional economists do not support deregulation. The administration appears to be giving greater weight to the freedom considerations than the welfare-economic considerations that were the focus of some previous administrations.

If the deregulatory rationale is not solely about economic efficiency, then some nonmonetary metric is needed to ascertain whether the Trump administration is reducing government intrusion into the lives of citizens and businesses. A potential new metric can be found in Executive Order 13771--one of the first issued by Trump--which stipulates that "for every new regulation issued, at least two prior regulations [must] be identified for elimination." EO 13771 also calls for a new regulatory budgeting process to control the overall cost of agency regulations. Prior to the Trump administration, there was no annual cap on the additional cost burdens an agency can impose.

At the end of fiscal year 2017, the Trump administration reported that it had accomplished 22 acts of deregulation for every act of regulation. It should be noted that this ratio is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Acts of deregulation are defined liberally by OIRA to include non-significant regulations (those not reviewed by OIRA), significant regulations (those reviewed by OIRA), economically significant regulations (those reviewed by OIRA and having the largest economic effect), guidance documents, paperwork requirements, and even avoidance of planned regulations. Acts of regulation are defined more narrowly to encompass only promulgation of significant new regulations. In our interviews with regulatory experts across the political spectrum, skepticism was expressed as to whether this approach to computing the ratio is intellectually defensible.

The regulatory budgeting process may have much less effect than proponents hoped, but also much less effect than opponents feared. That is because the political appointees in the Trump administration are not eager to adopt new regulations, especially ones that would impose additional costs on regulatees. Regulatory budgeting is more likely to affect a government like Tony Blair's 19972007 prime-ministership in the United...