The deregulator? wary libertarian enthusiasm greets Donald Trump's ambitious regulatory reform agenda.

AuthorWelch, Matt

IN DECEMBER 6, 2016, the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C.'s venerable libertarian think tank, held its first staff meeting since the election of Donald Trump. Normally such office gabfests tend to be "boring" and "routine," says Peter Van Doren, longtime editor of the Cato-published magazine Regulation. But after a presidential campaign that was anything but standard, featuring an improbable victor whom Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz had called "an American Mussolini" in National Review, emotions were running a bit high.

Peter Goettler, the cheery investment banker who became president and CEO of Cato in April 2015, took the temperature of the room. Any advocate for limited government can rattle off a list of Trump's demerits--his "know-nothing protectionism" (in Boaz's phrasing), his restrictionist/alarmist views on immigration, his unwillingness to confront the long-term drivers of government spending growth, his occasionally hostile approach to individual rights, his Great Man theories of governance, his carelessness with the truth, and so on. But professional libertarians are accustomed to feeling alienated by mainstream politics, and still manage to get up in the morning. So Goettler wanted to know: Who here can imagine themselves working in the same direction as Trump on those issues he has a chance to get right?

A clear majority of the room indicated not me, after which came what Van Doren described as an "intense debate." In the end, Goettler reminded the Catoites to avoid succumbing to the political passions of the moment. "One of the things I said in that meeting," he recalls, "is that your personal Twitter feed is unlikely to change the course of the republic, but your policy work might. So be focused on what counts."

Few things have mattered more to libertarian policy activists over the past half-century than deregulation. Rolling back government restrictions on individual and corporate behavior, breaking up state-backed cartels, getting bureaucrats out of the price-setting business, and allowing private entities to compete for services routinely monopolized by government--these have long been fundamental goals of libertarian organizations including Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes this magazine and engages in public policy research that promotes choice and competition. The reasons for eliminating federal regulations can be many: Well-intended rules frequently result in harmful unintended consequences, time and money directed to compliance or workarounds could often be better spent elsewhere, and one-size-fits-all decrees from Washington rarely incorporate the kind of local knowledge that individuals and companies possess about how their own business works best. Libertarians have made these arguments early and often to every new president, but since the deregulatory salad days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, few administrations have applied these insights into their policy making.

But as the initial shock of the 2016 election results gave way to the normal D.C. stuff of transition teams, Cabinet nominees, and policy rollouts, the city's libertarian policy wonks began to rub their eyes and adjust to a surprising new vision: a Trump administration that was stocking up on faces who have long worked to expand freedom by contracting the regulatory state. "I don't think that we ever envisioned that we would be supplying staffers to this semi-free market, semi-populist president," Frayda Levin, board chair of Americans for Prosperity and a Reason Foundation donor, told Politico in December. "But we're happy that he's picking people who have that free market background, particularly because on many issues, he is a blank slate, so anybody with expertise is in an amazing position to shape his agenda."

Trump's agenda-shapers in the Cabinet include Betsy DeVos at Education, Elaine Chao at Transportation, Rick Perry at Energy, and Tom Price at Health and Human Services. All are longstanding critics of the federal departments they now head. On the agency level, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now led by the deregulator Ajit Pai, who is already rolling back its aggressive encroachment into internet-related issues. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)--which many libertarians see as the most aggressive regulator in the federal bureaucracy--is being managed by an administrator, Scott Pruitt, who has previously described himself as "a leading advocate against the EPA'S activist agenda." And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could soon be run by physician Scott Gottlieb, who has spent a career railing against the agency's agonizing process for approving new drugs.

President Trump devoted three paragraphs of his first big speech to a joint session of Congress--the quasi-State of the Union made by a newly inaugurated president--to saving lives through FDA reforms, a topic that libertarians, often alone in the wilderness, have been howling about for years (and that previous presidents have left untouched in their SOTU addresses). In highlighting the case of Pompe Disease survivor Megan Crowley, who was in attendance because her father helped discover the drug that would eventually extend her life, Trump said, "Our slow and burdensome approval process at the Food and Drug Administration keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan's life, from reaching those in need. If we slash the restraints, not just at the FDA but across our government, then we will be blessed with far more miracles just like Megan. In fact, our children will grow up in a nation of miracles." A more sweeping evocation of deregulatory virtue you will rarely hear.

Two weeks later, Trump put taxpayer money where his mouth is, unveiling a budget blueprint that cut spending at every non-military/security-related agency in the federal government, including 31.4 percent from the EPA, 28.7 percent from the...

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