Trump wants to scrap two regulations for each new one adopted

President Trump signed an order Jan 30 aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate two regulations for each new one. The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses. It excluded regulations regarding the military.

The impact of the order was difficult to judge based on the president’s remarks. It could be difficult to implement under current law and would concentrate greater power in the Office of Management and Budget, which already reviews federal regulations. And it would add a new time-consuming requirement for any new congressional legislation on topics as varied as banking, health care, environment, labor conditions and more. President Trump said, “If you have a regulation you want, number one we’re not going to approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms. But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two. But it goes way beyond that.” But experts on government policy said Trump’s formulation made little sense. “There’s no logic to this,” William Gale, a tax and fiscal policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said before seeing the executive order. “The number of regulations is not the key. It’s how onerous regulations are. This seems like a totally nonsensical constraint to me.”