Trump's Raucous 'Midnight'.

• Author: Goldbeck, Dan

Given all the attention from supporters and critics alike of President Donald Trump's deregulatory agenda, including his "one-in, two-out" executive order that acted as a de facto regulatory budget, one might assume his "midnight regulations" would double-down on that agenda. Midnight regulations are generally defined as rules issued between election day and inauguration day when the sitting administration is leaving office. These regulations usually are priority items that the outgoing administration wants implemented before they can be blocked by the incoming administration.

It is reasonable to think that Trump's midnight would have been devoted to last-minute deregulation, but that was not the case. These Trump rules will impose billions of dollars in new compliance costs and tens of millions of hours in paperwork burdens on Americans. The new Biden administration will likely undo many of these midnight regulations, in some instances lessening burdens on individuals and business.

2020 in perspective / Before last fall's election, the Trump administration's rulemaking record was not dissimilar to other presidents' final year in office. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is charged with reviewing and approving executive agency actions, typically discharges 40-50 regulations a month. For perspective, from January to May of 2020, OIRA averaged 43 concluded reviews per month. That number jumped to 58 from June to October.

One might speculate that the increase was a push to publish rules before the start of the "lookback period" under the Congressional Review Act, the timeframe in which a new Congress can use a simple resolution to undo rulemaking from the final months of the last administration. The lookback period for 2020 began August 21, 2020, so anything after that date is fair game for Democrats to repeal in early 2021.

And there will be plenty of regulatory targets for the new Congress and President Joe Biden. From November 2020 to January 19, 2021, the Trump administration's pace of rulemaking picked up considerably. From 56 rules in November, to 84 in December, and finally 71 in less than three weeks in January, the Trump administration nearly equaled the record midnight output of 99 rules in a month during President Barack Obama's midnight period. The Trump team also pushed out 216 OIRA regulatory reviews in the midnight period, compared to 217 for the Obama administration. For a Republican comparative...