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-- 2017 --
December 14: Trump promises to reduce federal regulations to pre-1960 level
President Trump vowed Thursday to step up his war on government regulations, saying his ultimate goal is to shrink the Code of Federal Regulations to its 1960 size.
"The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden, screeching and beautiful halt," Trump said. "We're going to cut a ribbon because we're getting back below the 1960 level, and we'll be there fairly quickly."
In a White House photo op, Trump took a pair of gold scissors to a ribbon linking two mounds of paper — one representing regulations as they existed in 1960 and the other representing today's code.
The 1960 code: about 20,000 pages. Today: more than 185,000.
... Trump's regulation czar suggested that such a massive rollback of federal regulations wouldn't be that easy.
"I think returning to 1960s levels would likely require legislation. It's hard for me to know what that looks like," said Neomi Rao, the director of the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. "Deregulation also takes time. If we're doing something consistent with law, it takes time to reduce rules."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/12/14/trump-promises-reduce-federal-regulations-pre-1960-level/953072001/
December 15: AP fact check: Do Trump’s numbers on regulation add up?
President Donald Trump and his administration are ignoring one side of the ledger when they claim big savings from the federal regulations they’ve been able to roll back over most of this year.
Here’s a look at some of Trump’s statements about regulations and the economy Thursday and how they compare with the facts:
TRUMP: “Instead of adding costs, as so many others have done, and other countries, frankly, are doing in many cases, and it’s hurting them, for the first time in decades, we achieved regulatory savings.”
THE FACTS: There’s incomplete accounting behind that claim. Trump and his administration are adding up savings from the regulations that have been withdrawn through September and omitting the economic benefit that those rules provided [continue reading for more info and more examples]
The administration contends that it has completed 67 deregulatory actions and three regulatory actions through the end of September that will result in a cost savings of $570 million a year. But that figure does not include the offsetting of benefits that will now be missed because those rules are gone. The White House Office of Management and Budget confirmed that foregone benefits from retracted or modified rules are not part of that calculation.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-do-trumps-numbers-on-regulation-add-up
December 29: Trump Stretches Meaning of Deregulation in Touting Achievements
One is a federal rule, initiated by former President Barack Obama, that removed Yellowstone’s grizzlies from the list of endangered species. Another repealed a grant program that hasn’t been funded since 2011.
They are among the 67 so-called "deregulatory" actions President Donald Trump cited at a Dec. 14 event to tout "the most far-reaching regulatory reform in history” designed to unburden the U.S. economy from the shackles of government oversight.
While the president has succeeded in undoing some major environmental and financial industry rules, a Bloomberg News review of the administration’s list found almost a third of them actually were begun under earlier presidents.
Others strain the definition of lessening the burden of regulation or were relatively inconsequential, the kind of actions government implements routinely.
https://www.newsmax.com/finance/streettalk/trump-deregulation-achievements-rules/2017/12/29/id/834285/
-- 2018 --
January 20:
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/01/20/trumps-regulatory-experiment-year-one-000620
January 29: Workers’ health, safety, and pay are among the casualties of Trump’s war on regulations
A deregulation year in review
https://www.epi.org/publication/deregulation-year-in-review/
February 23: Court hands Trump another defeat in bid to block Obama-era oil and gas methane emissions rule
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/court-hands-trump-defeat-in-bid-to-block-methane-emissions-rule.html
March 4: With her scant background in education policy, Betsy DeVos’s views on higher education have been something of a mystery. But if one word can capture the essence of postsecondary policy under the current administration, it’s deregulation.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/DeVos-Has-Nixed-Several/242664
May 10:
But these repeals are largely the work of Congress and frequent punching bag for President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And now, most Obama-era regulations are off limits for the CRA (although Congress has explored expanding its use). That leaves President Trump and his administration to rely on the typical route for writing and revising regulations ...
Making announcements about a desire to repeal regulations is easy. President Trump did so in December (although his claim that 22 regulations had been repealed for every new regulation was vastly exaggerated). Actually repealing significant regulations is much harder, as the administration is finding out.
An agency must start by developing a proposal to repeal a regulation. This must often be accompanied by a detailed economic analysis of the repeal. The proposal and the analysis are then sent to the Office of Management and Budget for a review. When that review is complete, the proposal is published in the Federal Register for public comment. Agencies must review the public comments, respond to them, make any changes they feel necessary to their proposal and analysis, and then resubmit it to OMB before publishing a final rule. Finally, the rule is subject to litigation.
To navigate this process takes time and expertise. President Trump and his Cabinet members ... have instead tried to rush through the many steps of this process. This has meant that the last step, the litigation over regulatory repeals, has proven particularly problematic for the administration. At the EPA, courts have struck down delays or repeals of regulations six times already. This pattern holds across the government.
http://theconversation.com/trumps-deregulatory-record-doesnt-include-much-actual-deregulation-96161
October 16: Another Obama Decision Reversed? Now It's About Food Safety.
Citing President Donald Trump's calls for deregulation, Republican lawmakers and the chicken industry are aggressively lobbying to speed up poultry inspection lines — a change the Obama administration had rejected after warnings it would endanger workers and increase food contamination.
... worker safety advocates fear that revving up line speed will harm plant employees, many of whom are immigrants and refugees already operating under dangerous conditions. Eviscerating animal carcasses requires workers to use sharp tools to make forceful, repetitive motions at high speeds and exposes them to toxic chemicals used to kill bacteria.
"There's no data to support that this would be safe. And even at existing line speeds, it's extremely unsafe," said Debbie Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/another-obama-decision-reversed-now-it-s-about-food-safety-n810296
October 23: Trump Exceeds One-In, Two-Out Goals On Cutting Regulations, But It May Be Getting Tougher ... the administration is reporting that agencies continue to meet Trump’s requirement (initiated in Executive Order 13771 on Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs) to eliminate two significant regulations for every new one added.
While a dollar amount for cost savings of some $10 or $11 billion (in present value terms) was anticipated for fiscal year 2018, the White House says $23 billion was cut.
So far, then, the Trump administration fiscal-year updates report to have eliminated 134 significant rules (57 plus 67). However, additional eliminations have occurred of rules not officially considered “significant,” as well as eliminations of agency guidance documents argued to have regulatory effect.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2018/10/23/trump-exceeds-one-in-two-out-goals-on-cutting-regulations-but-it-may-be-getting-tougher/#4e9a08b23d40
November 14: Trump Brags About Deregulation, But A Huge Number Of His Deregulatory Actions Were Started Under Obama
President Donald Trump likes to brag about his record of cutting regulations. Yet new data from his own administration suggest that the rules he's managed to eliminate have had a minor impact at best—and many began under the Obama administration.
That doesn't mean that Trump's deregulatory agenda is a myth, as some critics have claimed, but it does show the limitations of what any one administration can do unilaterally to pare back the administrative state.
https://cei.org/content/trump-brags-about-deregulation-huge-number-his-deregulatory-actions-were-started-under-obama
-- 2019 --
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