In what is shaping up to be another week of significant moves by the Trump administration, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that forces government agencies to repeal two existing regulations for every new one they create.
The executive order also calls for all new regulations made during the 2017 fiscal year to have a cost “no greater than zero,” meaning that not only must government agencies decrease their overall number of rules, but those rules cannot increase spending by as much as one cent. With 440 federal agencies currently in existence according to the Federal Register, President Trump’s move will cause some serious ripple effects, and not just for obvious reasons.
The first agency that the establishment media thought of regarding the order’s effects was the Environmental Protection Agency, which currently has the most expensive regulations of all – partly because they falsified the benefits of the programs and rules they were imposing under former President Obama.
One study conducted in 2014 found that out of the forty-five rules for which the EPA calculated long-term benefits, 97% of the benefits were “derived from the reduction of a single element – fine particulate matter – that was incidental to the pollutant targeted by the regulation.” Keep in mind that the EPA, as of 2014, had 7,570 more rules that they did not bother calculating any benefit for at all. Other agencies have similar issues, with overlapping or even unconstitutional missions and long histories of doing whatever is necessary to ensure their continued existence.
President Trump’s executive order will force nearly radical change at the EPA and other agencies, but there is another layer to his action. The president’s action is indirectly keeping yet another of his campaign promises – to bring more jobs back to home. In 2015, a study done at George Mason University analyzed the 103 million words in the Code of Federal Regulations. The goal of the study was to see how many regulatory restrictions apply to specific industries, and whether those regulations have decreased jobs and increased restrictions over time. The study found that “doubling regulation in an industry leads to a 9% decrease in new business start-ups…[and] also leads to a 5% decrease in new hires.”
The job decrease works in reverse when discussing the federal government. New regulations require new sub-agencies, inspectors and enforcers and administrative personnel. In other words, more federal regulations decrease the private sector while increasing the size of the federal government.
By signing this executive order and a few others, Trump has effectively turned the tables on some entrenched processes within the Washington government machine. Last week he placed a hiring freeze on federal agencies, which set the stage for Monday’s “one in, two out” action. Together, the two orders stop the excessive hiring of federal bureaucrats, pause the machine that continues to grow the federal government, end the resultant spending that comes with constantly increasing regulation, and put the United States on track to start creating more jobs.
Not bad for a pen and a phone.
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