EDITORIAL: Is Donald Trump’s regulatory agenda losing steam?

Aside from his success in appointing constitutionalist judges to the federal judiciary, Donald Trump’s greatest achievement has been the vigor with which he has attacked regulatory excess.

The administration estimates that policies such as “one-in, two-out” — in which the White House repealed two regulations for every new one imposed — helped save $23 billion in fiscal 2018 and a projected $18 billion in fiscal 2019. Many of these triumphs were achieved thanks to the Congressional Review Act, which helped Mr. Trump reverse a slew of the Obama administration’s last-second edicts.

But now some observers worry that the president’s agenda has lost steam.

“There are warning signs,” writes Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The major pertinent issue is Trump administration’s own impulses favorable toward regulation, from antitrust to vaping. These undermine, and could even derail, his deregulatory program.”

Areas that Mr. Crews cites as evidence of the administration’s weakening resolve on regulation include the president’s support for the Export-Import Bank, the bloated farm bill and Mr. Trump’s dalliances with trade barriers and tariffs.

“The conventional administrative state and big-spending appropriations framework exert a considerable gravitational force,” Mr. Crews notes. “Trump cannot and has not stopped it all, and he has added his own pro-regulatory elements to the picture.”

Mr. Trump has turned around the moribund Obama economy in part because of his insistence on emphasizing tax relief and regulatory reform, sending a clear message to the nation’s business community. His advisers should inform the president that too many favorable “impulses” toward the bureaucracy might jeopardize his economic legacy.