Regulatory Warfare
Commentary
In his 2019 State of the Union address to Congress, President Donald Trump deplored “the new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” affirmed that ”America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control,” that ”we are born free and we will stay free,” and decreed that “tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
The Trump presidency is usually sized up based on the onslaughts waged against it by the left, such as accusations of Russia’s influence on his campaign, which three years of wasted, taxpayer-funded investigation thoroughly discredited; the two failed impeachments; plus, as regards policy, policing the border against illegal immigration and weaponizing trade policy against foreign adversaries like China; and, finally, saving the nation from what we know now would have been three Hillary Clinton Supreme Court appointees.
But arguably the former president’s most consequential actions opposing the encroachment of socialism—and those most hated and resisted by the Washington swamp—were in the regulatory sphere.
The pushback against his administration’s prodigious deregulation measures is still unceasing.
In recent days we have seen American industry complain that Washington is inflicting upon the U.S. economy a banking regulatory regime far more punitive than the trends found in the socialistic European Union. Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Transportation Department, for example, just rescinded President Trump’s 2020 authorization allowing the transport of liquefied natural gas via railway; and President Joe Biden is even resurrecting the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act’s artificially high wage rules for Big Labor, dead since the Reagan era, to be applied to the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy initiatives.
There is an inherently undemocratic character to the relentless thirst for more and more regulation. A President Trump executive order directed executive branch agencies to post their guidance documents on the internet and identify the rules they use in determining them. The purpose was “to ensure that Americans are subject to only those binding rules imposed through duly enacted statutes or through regulations lawfully promulgated under them, and that Americans have fair notice of their obligations…” This approach had bipartisan support, yet President Biden revoked the order on the very day he took office, told the agencies to cease public disclosure and explanation, and took down the agencies’ guidance websites.
One might ask, then: If the regulations are so great and necessary, why don’t the regulators want the public to know as much about the rules as possible?
In the wake of revoking the Trump demand for governmental transparency, Susan Dudley, who founded the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and was the regulation overseer in the George W. Bush White House, warned two years ago that while “President Biden certainly displays more personal humility than his predecessor … he must embrace regulatory humility as well.” She noted that “in revoking former President Trump’s regulatory executive orders, President Biden threw at least one baby out with the bathwater. He abandoned Executive Order 13,891, which required agencies to seek public input when developing significant new guidance and to make all their guidance readily accessible online,” a case of a “Trump initiative that received general support from a wide range of law and policy experts who have worried about lack of transparency and abuse of guidance for decades.”
The Trump administration boasted of cutting close to eight regulations for every new one imposed, with the ultimate effect of lifting Americans’ real incomes more than $3,000 annually per household, and saving consumers and businesses over $220 billion a year. And even when courts blocked Trump’s deregulation, remnants often remained. Plus, as aggressive as the Biden administration has been in reversing his predecessor’s regulatory relief, he could not always succeed. For instance, President Barack Obama’s broad climate regulatory authority on states’ electricity production, scrapped by President Trump, could not be reinstated by President Biden, and the administration has been forced to pursue a different approach.
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