Thanks to Trump, Fewer Federal Rules in 2019 Than in Any Other Year on Record
If you like your deregulation, you can keep your deregulation.
That was the message the Trump administration sent in 2019, a year that ended with fewer rules on the books in the Federal Register than in any year on record.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Federal Register is sort of like the massive instruction manual to how bureaucracy works. It contains all of the rules and regulations of the U.S. government compiled by the Office of the Federal Register. It’s a good barometer of how much red tape is being added or subtracted at the federal level.
We usually judge how successful a president is at regulation or deregulation by the number of pages in the register itself. Using that yardstick, it was a good-not-great year.
On the final working day of 2019, the Federal Register stood at 72,564 pages, according to an Op-Ed by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in Forbes.
This was somewhat longer than Trump’s 2018 Federal Register — which stood at 63,645 pages — and slightly shorter than what reading “Finnegans Wake” feels like.
Trump’s first year in office had also seen the fewest number of pages — 61,308 — since Bill Clinton’s 1993 Federal Register. If you’re going by that marker, it’s still better than the all-time high set by Barack Obama in 2016 (95,894) but still quite a bit more than it was under Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush.
However, there are two reasons that Crews says you probably shouldn’t look at page length as a judge of how deregulation is going.
“A caveat: offsetting the Federal Register increase, it happens to be the case that removing rules requires writing new rules under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act’s public notice-and-comment process,” he wrote. “(And things can get even far more convoluted than that.)
“In other words, even deregulation itself can grow the Federal Register, if aggressive enough, confounding interpretation taken in isolation.” [Emphasis his.]
Furthermore, even if the number of pages went up, the number of rules went down.
“The December 31, 2019 Federal Register closed out with 2,964 final rules within its pages,” Crews wrote.
“This is the lowest count since records started being kept in the mid-1970s (that records began at the bicentennial is itself indicative of the disinclination to disclose). Trump’s earlier 2017 count of 3,281 had been the previous best.”
That means there are even fewer rules than there were under Reagan or either Bush, not to mention any of the Democrats during that period. When George H.W. Bush took over from Ronald Reagan during the first year of his term in 1989, for instance, there were over 4,700 rules on the book.
And you should also keep in mind the fact that some of these rules were getting rid of other rules. Thus, even as they were pruning the book, we were still getting fewer rules.
In an official statement on Dec. 31, the White House touted its record on deregulation.
“President Trump has delivered on, and far exceeded, his promise to slash two existing regulations for every new regulation,” the statement read.
“Since taking office, President Trump has rolled back nearly 8 regulations for every new significant one,” it read. “The Trump Administration’s deregulatory efforts have slashed regulatory costs by more than $50 billion.
“In the coming years, the average American household is projected to see an income gain of $3,100 per year thanks to President Trump’s historic regulatory reform.”
Those projections are almost certainly a bit too rosy, but that’s how politicians roll.
In the meantime, it’s still worth noting that deregulation is generally a good thing and all three of the lowest rule counts in the Federal Register belong to Trump. He’s also been in office for only three years, so do the math there.
Again, it’s hard to judge what the number of rules means when compared with the number of pages in the Federal Register. After all, longer rules can create more red tape than shorter rules, so there’s something to be said for fewer pages.
This all being said, there are fewer rules than any time in the past 43 years.
No matter how you feel about the president and whether he’s kept his pledge to make government smaller — one would have preferred him to have been as hawkish on the deficit as he was on overregulation in 2019, for instance — that’s something for all conservatives to celebrate.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
