President Trump is winning on one key campaign promise, cutting regulations and virtually eliminating the release of new ones.
In fact, he has cut the output of costly regulations so deeply that a group that charts the federal government’s output of rules has called the shift “historic.”
American Action Forum told Secrets that Trump has cut the output of regulations to just 8 percent of the averages under former President Obama and other recent administrations.
What’s more, the cost of the new regulations has dropped from an average of $26 billion to $33 million, or just 0.12 of the past average for the first five months of the year.
Nice start, but regulatory reform is desperately needed if the economy is to grow at its full potential. Regulatory reform is unsexy, and doesn’t make for good re-election ads, but the almost 100,000 pages of Federal Regulations and our absurd 70,000 page tax code force our industries to compete with the world with cinder blocks strapped to their feet.
And here’s something else Trump is doing right:
The Justice Department announced Wednesday it will no longer allow prosecutors to strike settlement agreements with big companies directing them to make payouts to outside groups, ending an Obama-era practice that Republicans decried as a “slush fund” that padded the accounts of liberal interest groups.
Under Obama, coerced settlements were used to force businesses to fund left-wing groups and created the professional protest industry to guarantee that there will be media-friendly protests any time any left-wing policy is in danger of being overturned.
2 things:
– Government estimates of the costs of new regulations are almost uniformly low, often by large amounts. In some cases it is done deliberately to reduce the review process. While 33 million is much smaller than 26 billion, I suspect the real cost of those new rules is at least 66 million and likely to be over 100 million.
– As far as I have heard, government agencies have been reluctant to come up with rules that can be eliminated. If the President wants to get serious about reducing regulations, he is going to have to have knowledgeable people from outside of an agency review it’s rules while simultaneously reviewing the law the agency operates under or implements – making significant cuts will take a large amount of work. I hope his effort will be more successful than Sisyphus and his rock.
V – in addition, Trump and Ryan have actually rescinded most of the Obama administration’s eleventh-hour regulations. And they may go back and rescind more. It’s an interesting story.
The fact that all these things are being done without any yuge cry from the media and the lefties makes suffering through their all encompassing Russia obsession worth it. Good things are happening…I’m glad I voted for Trump.