President Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of American prosperity by dismantling the regulatory state. As in his first term, where I was proud to serve, his administration is slashing red tape, unleashing U.S. energy, and turning the United States into the undisputed engine of global growth. Meanwhile, in the European Union, a left-wing cabal of bureaucrats is constructing a brick wall of regulations and compliance costs that punishes American businesses and threatens Trump’s golden age.
The EU has entered a phase of hostility toward American success. Brussels has long been the global hub for central planning, seeking to overregulate instead of innovate. If we fail to confront this regulatory imperialism now, the consequences will fall on workers worldwide whose livelihoods depend on American innovation.
The most egregious example of this overreach is the EU’s transparently political vendetta against Elon Musk and his social media platform X. Under the banner of the Digital Services Act, European commissars are attempting to act as the world’s censors. They have levied astronomical “user protection” fines against X because Musk dared to restore the principle of open debate to the digital town square.
EUROPE’S ‘DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY’ IS AN ATTACK AGAINST US INNOVATORS
Brussels is not coming for the company; they are coming for the man.
The personal threats and vengeful rhetoric directed at Musk by EU officials are a warning to every American entrepreneur: If you do not bow to the radical sensitivities of the European elite, they will use their regulatory machinery to bankrupt you. It is a protectionist shakedown masquerading as public safety, and it is an attack on our American value of free speech.
The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are another tool of the EU deep state designed with one goal in mind: to kneecap American “gatekeepers” while providing a free ride to European laggards. Under the DMA and DSA, the EU has hit American companies such as Apple and Meta with fines of 700 million euros combined.
These fines from the EU on American companies have sparked outrage across the U.S., with many pointing to the fact that the EU made more money from fining U.S. companies than it made in tax revenue from its own tech companies in 2024.
Recent surveys also show that the vast majority of Europeans find their online experience has actually worsened under the DMA. Instead of the seamless, high-speed services they were used to, users are now met with endless consent pop-ups, broken integrations, and degraded search results.
So, Brussels has achieved the impossible: It has made the internet harder to use while stifling the very competition it claimed to promote.
And perhaps the most dangerous of the EU’s regulation obsession is found with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. These backdoor maneuvers aim to impose a sweeping, unpopular environmental, social, and governance agenda on major corporations worldwide, and they’re being quietly rubber-stamped by EU bureaucrats just before Christmas, banking on the assumption that Americans won’t be paying attention.
Through these directives, the EU is attempting to extend its jurisdiction into every American boardroom. They are demanding that American companies comply with disastrously complex reporting requirements and face legal liability for the actions of every small supplier in their global chain. This is a deliberate attempt to drive up the cost of business for American energy and manufacturing firms, forcing them to abandon the reliable, affordable power that fuels our economy. It is an attack on American energy independence and a gift to our adversaries who do not play by these suicidal rules.
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Thankfully, we have a president who is refusing to submit to the new world order Brussels is trying to dictate. The message from the Trump administration in recent weeks has been clear: The days of American subservience to the whims of Brussels are over. Nothing better encapsulated this strength than Trump’s recent interview with Politico when he took the EU to task. The president and his team have not and will not sit idly by while a group of failed social engineers in a foreign capital attempts to regulate our best companies into oblivion. It’s important that they keep up the pressure and not let up in these final days of the year, when Brussels attempts to do its worst on CSRD and CSDDD.
Americans believe in the power of the individual, the sanctity of the free market, and the sovereignty of our own people. If Europe chooses to regulate itself into a museum of the 20th century, that is its right. But it should not be allowed to drag the American economy down with it.
Matt Mowers is a EU-US Forum Founding Board Member and a former Trump administration senior White House adviser at the Department of State.
