WASHINGTON -- As the Trump administration nears its one-year mark, White House officials are touting cuts to regulations as one of their top achievements.
"In the history of our country, no president, during their entire term, has cut more regulations than we've cut," President Donald Trump said last month. His Press Secretary Sarah Sanders puts the total at nearly 1,000.
But government records -- and in some cases the agencies carrying out Trump's policies -- tell a very different story.
For one thing, only a handful of regulations have actually been taken off the books. That's due to laws that keep government policies from wildly swinging back and forth every time moving trucks show up at the White House.
Rather, the claim of victory in the war on regulation is instead based almost entirely on stopping proposed rules that haven't yet made their way through the machinery of government. The White House says it has killed or stalled 860 pending regulations. It's done this by withdrawing 469, listing another 109 as inactive and relegating 282 to "long term."
A Bloomberg News review has found even those claims are exaggerated. Hundreds of the pending regulations had been effectively shelved before Trump took office. Others listed as withdrawn are actually still being developed by federal agencies. Still more were moot because the actions sought in a pending rule were already in effect.
There is little doubt that the government under Trump has launched an aggressive assault on regulations governing everything from climate change to financial transactions, and policies restricting new ones are likely to have long-term impacts on the government.
With the help of the Republican Congress, more than a dozen regulations enacted in the final months of the Obama administration were repealed this year with a little-used law called the Congressional Review Act designed to thwart 11th-hour rulemaking by an outgoing administration. They range from Department of Labor ergonomics standards to a financial watchdog agency's rule making it easier for consumers to sue banks and a measure to deter people with mental illnesses from being able to purchase firearms.
The administration has also dramatically slowed the adoption of new rules. The White House's regulation-oversight arm, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, had completed reviews on just 52 final rules that had bubbled up from the bureaucracy through Nov. 29, according to its records. President Barack Obama's OIRA team had finalized reviews on more than four times that many during the same period last year.
"The president has more or less paused new regulations," Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said.
Business on 12/12/2017