The White House detailed the order in a memo, obtained Friday morning by the Washington Examiner, which follows through on one of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises. It requires federal agencies to “identify at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed” for every new proposed rule, regulation, or guidance.

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The order further directs the Office of Management and Budget to set “standardized measurement and estimation of regulatory costs” and “requires that for fiscal 2025, the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, be significantly less than zero.”

A senior White House official briefed on the president’s plans said Friday’s order marks a “massive” step in cutting through bureaucratic red tape. The Trump White House generally believes that “overregulation” is a driving cost of inflation, specifically rising energy prices.

“The Biden administration imposed a historic $1.7 trillion in costs on the American people,” the White House memo reads. “Overregulation stops American entrepreneurship, crushes small business, reduces consumer choice, discourages innovation, and infringes on the liberties of American citizens.”

Just 10 days into his first term in office, Trump signed the order installing the aforementioned 2-for-1 deregulatory benchmark, but former President Joe Biden rescinded that order on his first day in office. Trump officials say the president went on to leave office removing five regulations for each one added.

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House Republicans introduced legislation shortly after Trump’s inauguration that would similarly require federal agencies to roll back 10 rules or regulations for each one added.

“The American people need real leadership to rein in regulation that has burdened businesses and families for far too long,” Rep. David Taylor (R-OH), who introduced the bill, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The ‘Regulation Decimation Act’ does just that by requiring 10 regulations to be eliminated with the implementation of every new one.”

Critics of Trump’s deregulatory agenda argue that slashing red tape, coupled with the Department of Government Efficiency’s broad mandate to shrink the federal workforce and budget, could lead to downstream or unintended problems for consumers.

Brookings Institution fellow Robert Litan wrote on Jan. 20 of this year that “regulations keep our food supply, automobiles, financial markets and institutions, pharmaceuticals, and workplaces safer, our environment cleaner, and our financial markets and instruments more transparent than they otherwise would be.”

“Without regulation, consumers may not be fully informed about the risks of the products and services they buy. Private markets alone are likely to underinvest in so-called public goods,” he continued. “Over many decades, Congress has enacted a growing number of statutes requiring federal agencies to mitigate these market failures. Notably, many of the rules that conservatives now attack — those addressing environmental and workplace externalities — have been issued by agencies that were created and under statutes passed with the support of a Republican president, Richard Nixon.”