‘Deregulation Day’ Spotlights Big Changes Trump Is Bringing to Washington

Monday is “Deregulation Day” for the federal government as declared by President Donald Trump, and thus is an opportune time to deliver the findings of The Heritage Foundation’s latest tracking of regulation.

The bad news is that the final year of the Obama administration brought the private-sector costs of its reign of regulatory excess to $122 billion a year.

On the other hand, the Trump administration, in its first six months, launched a multifaceted reform agenda that has slowed regulatory output. Some rules have been blocked and others rescinded, along with the withdrawal of hundreds of other regulations from the rule-making pipeline.

Six months is too short a time span to declare victory, however, and it remains to be seen whether Trump will succeed in reversing decades of regulatory overreach.

The need for reform has never been greater. Regulation acts as a stealth tax on the American people and the U.S. economy, and exacts an incalculable toll on individual liberty. Trump and his appointees need all of the means available to them to overcome the powerful forces that favor the status quo.

As for that regulatory excess, the Obama administration in 2016 issued more than 2,600 new rules, including 54 “major” regulations that saddled the private sector with $14.7 billion in new annual costs. Based on The Heritage Foundation’s tracking, last year’s rules brought the Obama administration’s eight-year total to more than 23,000 regulations, including 285 major rules with $122 billion in cumulative annual costs.

Obama final year:

- 40 percent of all major rules
- 21 out of 54 rules were finalized after the election on Nov. 8

These “midnight” regulations included some of the costliest rules of the year:

- $1.1 billion, EPA’s renewable fuel standard
- $741 million, Department of Energy’s energy conservation standards for air conditioners and heat pumps

It’s easy to grow government, no mater how unconstitutional.

Very hard to shrink government.

Leftist government growth over the last 100 years has crept in “like fog on cat’s feet”.

But it will take a “nuclear option” to blow up the 80% unconstitutional portion of the $4 trillion government. Government and its “eternal life” bureaucracies will not go without a fight so we must be ready to fight, even to the death if that’s what it will take.

Trump has begun the process and the fight. We will need to finish it in order to restore our Free Constitutional Republic.

POTUS DJT actions to reduce the administrative state and reverse Obama’s failures (these are not reported by the msm):

- Trump moved quickly to direct department heads to freeze rule-making until a senior Trump appointee approved the proposed regulations
- directed agency heads to withdraw regulations that had been sent to the Office of the Federal Register, but had not yet been published
- postpone for 60 days the regulations that had been published in the Federal Register, but had not yet taken effect
- conducted significantly fewer reviews of new rules
- withdrew a higher proportion of new rules
- applied the Congressional Review Act to eliminate 14 Obama-era regulations
- issued executive orders and memoranda, ..to have a direct and substantial impact on the regulatory process
- E.O. 13771 directs executive departments and agencies to identify for repeal at least two existing regulations for every one new regulation they promulgate
- sets the basis for a “regulatory budget”—and holds agencies to no net increase in regulatory costs this year
- directs the head of each regulatory agency to designate a regulatory reform officer to oversee regulatory reform initiatives
- each agency is also instructed to establish a regulatory reform task force to evaluate regulations and recommend rules for repeal, replacement, or modification
- directing the secretary of labor to re-examine the onerous fiduciary duty rule
- directing the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works to review the overly broad definition of “waters of the United States” as it applies to regulation under the Clean Water Act
- directing agencies responsible for regulating domestic energy production to propose revisions to, or rescissions of, regulatory barriers that impede U.S. energy independence
- rescinds several Obama orders related to climate change and directs a reconsideration of the $7.2 billion Clean Power Plan
- instituted a variety of other rule delays and reconsiderations
- Food and Drug Administration on May 4 announced the delay of the compliance deadline for the costly rule on nutrition labeling of standard menu items (from May 5, 2017, to May 7, 2018)
- revoked an Obama directive allowing transgender students in public schools and other government facilities to use the bathrooms and locker rooms as befit their gender identity
- Trump announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change

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