President Trump has continued his unprecedented rollback of federal regulations, making good on a key 2016 campaign promise. But his own regulatory “impulses” threaten to give Washington’s “swamp” new powers, including targeting conservatives, according to a top expert on the administrative state.
On the one hand, Trump has cut regulations, rules, and even pages in the Federal Register to historic lows. He’s easily matched his pledge to kill two old regulations for every new one. Last year, he slashed more than four for every new one, far from his record of 17-1.
And, said Competitive Enterprise Institute Vice President Clyde Wayne Crews, Trump’s orders on trade, healthcare, social media, federal lands, and artificial intelligence threaten his record regulatory cutting and could hand any subsequent Democratic president the keys to opening a treasure chest of crushing new rules.
“I don’t want to say ‘won,’” Crews said of Trump’s actions so far. “Trump did about the best he could.”
“But, unfortunately, in pushing these other programs, he is enabling a future victory of the swamp that eclipses what he achieved in the regulatory rollback. I want to get the message out that he needs to wake up to and prevent. His own expansion of the administrative state overwhelms his own reduction of it. And those reductions were unprecedented. Why wreck them?” he added.
Trump’s recent executive order on social media, aimed at limiting efforts by outlets such as Twitter to target conservatives, is especially troubling, said Crews, Washington’s go-to expert on regulations.
In pushing federal agencies to address social media rules and regulations, he said, it creates a structure that a future liberal president can twist to target the very conservatives Trump seeks to protect. And, he added, the oversight “regime” created by the executive order will be manned by the swamp. “That’s not going to be run by conservatives,” warned Crews.
Few follow federal regulations with the zeal of Crews. Among the several reports he does for CEI is his key annual review (shown below), called “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.”
Since Trump’s victory, it has validated the efforts by the GOP White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and key agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Department, and the Agriculture Department to ease regulations. He has also highlighted the administration’s push to eliminate rules that hampered a quick federal reaction to the coronavirus crisis.
His latest report highlighted the low number of rules pushed out by the administration. He said that in 2019 there were “2,964 final rules in the Federal Register, which was the lowest count since records began being kept in the 1970s and is the only sub-3,000 tally ever.”
But he also expanded the chapter titled “Swamp Things — Trump’s Discordant Regulatory Impulses Threaten to Derail His Successes and Expand the Administrative State.”
He wrote, “Trump cuts. But Trump also adds.”
And he concluded that for all the good Trump has done in cutting regulations, especially costly ones imposed late in the Obama administration, there is nothing to stop a future president from reversing course because Congress hasn’t put the president’s orders into law.
“When all is said and done, the administrative state cannot be said to have fundamentally changed under Trump,” said Crews, who added, “A pruned weed is a healthy weed when it comes to the administrative state’s half-hearted rollbacks, so expectations for executive branch-only reforms must be tempered.”
