635 Proposals Withdrawn from Regulatory Pipeline

The Trump administration has withdrawn 635 proposals from the regulatory pipeline. Another 244 were made inactive.^[1]

Early in his term, the president issued Executive Order 13771, directing federal agencies to repeal at least two existing regulations for every regulation they add.^[2]

Then, in 2017, Congress overturned a number of last-minute regulations imposed by the Obama administration.^[3] Additionally, the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act included a significant regulatory reduction by repealing the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.

Earlier Numbers of the Day have noted that 70 billion dollars is spent annually by federal regulatory agencies and that there are at least 283,996 federal regulators. That’s twice as many as in 1990 and five times as many as in 1960.

Additionally, 98.5 percent of crimes on the books were never approved by Congress.

Ballotpedia's Administrative State Project tracks the number of federal administrative agency documents and total pages added to the Federal Register on a weekly basis.

Footnotes:

1. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, "Current Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions," accessed December 28, 2017
2. Federal Register, "Executive Order 13771 of January 30, 2017: Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs," February 3, 2017
3. The Daily Signal, "The High Tide of Red Tape Ebbs Under Trump’s Ambitious Deregulatory Push," December 15, 2017

Each weekday, Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day explores interesting and newsworthy topics at the intersection of culture, politics, and technology. Columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.

Scott Rasmussen is founder and president of the Rasmussen Media Group. He is the author of "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System," "In Search of Self-Governance," and "The People’s Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt." Read more reports from Scott Rasmussen — Click Here Now.