EDITORIAL: Trump efforts to tame regulatory state bearing fruit

Talk of the “big beautiful bill” and tariffs have dominated the first six months of the second Trump administration. The president’s actions to shrink the administrative state deserve as much attention.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulations cost U.S. taxpayers $2.155 trillion in 2024. That’s more than $16,000 per household. Not surprisingly, the Biden White House contributed heavily to the bloated federal regulatory apparatus, adding rules at a much faster pace than its predecessors.

“Regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs and lower output,” Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., the institute’s Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies, told the Daily Caller.

Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to ease the burden. He has issued executive orders rescinding a number of rules issued by the previous administration in its waning hours and has imposed guidelines that encourage agencies to minimize mandates. That includes orders to cut 10 existing rules for each new one and to offset the costs of any new edicts with savings elsewhere. Another White House goal is to ensure that the costs of regulations issued in fiscal 2025 is “significantly less than zero.”

As a result, Mr. Crews noted in a Forbes op-ed, “the first year of the second Trump administration is on track … to deliver the lowest rule count ever recorded.” And many of the rules aren’t really rules at all. They’re “unrules,” in Mr. Crews’ words, intended to delay or withdraw a pending federal regulation.

“What’s unfolding is rather astonishing,” Mr. Crews wrote. “While conventional voices wail about chaos and disarray in the White House, it’s becoming clear that much regulation was never needed, was constitutionally suspect and amounted to bureaucratic overreach. The so-called ‘chaos’ is merely the old administrative state being tamed.”

Defenders of the bureaucracy argue that a hyperactive federal government protects American consumers and interests from all manner of potential danger — and certainly many rules serve a useful purpose. But the proliferation of red tape in recent decades comes at a steep cost and is often duplicative, excessive, suffocating, complex and inefficient. There’s also the question of whether agencies are exceeding the authority granted them by the Constitution and Congress.

The Code of Federal Regulations stands at more than 180,000 pages, almost tripling in size since 1970. There is no aspect of American life today that isn’t touched by some edict originating inside the Beltway. Mr. Trump’s attacks on the metastasizing regulatory state represent a return to constitutional principles and common sense.