President Trump is being urged to double down on his deregulation efforts and erase massive Obama-era red tape, including those slowing the fight against the coronavirus.
In a new battle plan for the White House, a stepped-up war on regulations includes a moratorium on additional rules, widespread elimination of others, and emergency “sunset” deadlines on those blocking a speedy economic recovery.
“If Congress can spend to stimulate, Washington can also deregulate to stimulate,” read the blueprint drawn up by regulatory expert Clyde Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy and a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Given partisan discord, we have to be realistic and recognize that the sweeping ‘deregulatory stimulus’ that is needed now as an alternative to unlimited-spending stimulus will not be fully adopted by Congress. That means there need to be more unilateral moves by President Trump to streamline regulation,” he added in the report provided to Secrets.
Trump has led in the war on regulations, far exceeding his 2016 campaign promise to eliminate two Obama-era regulations for every new one.
But Crews said that the president can do more by executive action to kill red tape stalling the efforts to slow the coronavirus fight and revive the economy.
“If Congress will not act on regulatory streamlining in the next ‘phases’ of recovery legislation, Trump has options for unilateral action,” he wrote in the report.
And in a challenge to the White House, Crews said that Trump should follow the even harsher deregulatory actions of former President Ronald Reagan and a plan put out by Mitt Romney when he ran for president in 2012 that would require Congress to OK most regulations.
A key thrust of the report is pushing Trump’s White House to be as active cutting regulations as Obama was imposing them with a “pen and a phone.” In his last two years in office, Obama famously said he would use executive actions to impose his rules that businesses called choking.
“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said at his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, warning he would issue regulations despite congressional opposition.
Wrote Crews, “In a constitutional republic, presidential powers are rightly limited, but, as Obama noted, the executive does have a pen and phone. As a corollary to that, he wields an eraser too, where appropriate.”
Key recommendations include:
- Boost the two-for-one regulation killing effort, let agencies target rules on their own, and relax enforcement.
- Impose a moratorium on new regulations and freeze others.
- Sunset regulations on the books.
“Rules and regulations live on, even if the unelected agency personnel that created them are, in some cases, long deceased. Yet, every regulation should have an expiration date and disappear unless consciously, soberly renewed — not just the troublesome ones that catch our eye in pandemic-stricken 2020. Putting legacy rules and those created between now and the next crisis on the expiration review schedule would bank resilience for the next emergency,” said Crews.
