President Trump has long made cutting regulations a signature talking point. In 2017, he even held an event at the White House where he cut a literal red tape before the cameras.
Earlier this year, he bragged his administration had “ended this regulatory assault on the American worker.”
The outgoing administration has indeed been the most aggressive one in recent memory at paring back regulations. But in a demonstration of Washington’s insatiable appetite for new rules and the temptation to use those rules to bypass Congressional gridlock, the cost of regulations have actually increased in three of the four years Trump was in office, according to new data from a center-right think tank.
President Trump prepares to cut a red tape representing government regulations at the White House during an event in 2017. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The American Action Forum reports that new regulations costing $14.7 billion were added in 2020 alone. Another way to measure it: 290 million “paperwork hours” were added on the to-do lists of workers in government and the private sector last year.
The data was compiled by bringing together each of the relevant government agency’s own estimate of the impact of any given regulation. “Predominantly, what they're calculating is the estimate of economic impact on the private sector,” says Dan Bosch, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, and one of the report authors.
“So most of the costs, but I can't say all, are expected to be borne by the private sector,” Bosch says.
From 2017 to 2020, the data shows, Washington finalized 1,336 regulations across a range of government agencies with a total cost of $64.7 billion and almost 330 million paperwork hours.
‘An expensive rule’
Bosch points to three areas where he’s seen notable increases in regulations during the Trump administration.
Immigration has seen an uptick as Trump and his aides have used new rules to make it harder for immigrants to enter and stay in the U.S. National security and defense contracting is a second area that has seen a surge in regulations.
Health care is the third area of increase. Bosch notes that new regulations on transparency and coverage for hospital procedures was “an expensive rule” that cost almost $34 billion to comply with. Last year, Trump said the changes were a “major victory in our mission to deliver great health care at a price that you can afford.”
President Trump after signing an executive order aimed at requiring hospitals to be more transparent about prices in 2019. (REUTERS/Erin Scott)
Speaking Wednesday on Yahoo Finance about another sector, Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at Compass Point Research & Trading, noted that "the scale and scope of the bank deregulatory actions by the Trump administration was actually far less than anyone thought the morning after Trump won."
“The Biden administration is going to nominate individuals who will roll back some of the bank deregulatory activity from the Trump administration, but not all,” Boltansky said.
‘A big departure from what's normal’
Bosch and his colleagues at the American Action Forum, including co-author Dan Goldbeck, have tracked the ups and downs of regulations going back to 2005 when George W. Bush was president.
There have been a whole lot more ups than downs: “2018 is the only year that we have on our record that showed [regulatory costs] going down,” Bosch says. That year, the cost of regulations fell by $7.8 billion, according to the group’s data.
During the Obama administration, cost of regulations increased by an average of $100 billion a year – more in a single year than the sum total of increases during Trump’s four years.
“Compared to what we saw under the Obama administration and even under the Bush administration, it's a big departure from what's normal,” Bosch says.
A recent report on the Trump administration from the conservative CATO Institute had similar findings. The “flow of new regulations was much smaller than under the previous two administrations,” CATO authors wrote, but added that Trump’s promised rollback had proceeded slowly.
Bosch expects regulation costs to increase significantly in 2021 with the Biden administration. Even with a strong showing by Democrats on Tuesday in Georgia, the Biden administration will face a moderate Congress that is likely to cast a skeptical eye on some of the President-elect’s bigger campaign promises.
President-elect Joe Biden in Georgia on Monday during a visit to campaign with Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
If history is a guide, Biden will almost surely turn to new regulations to implement some of his promises when facing Congressional gridlock just as Trump did in recent years.
Bosch says the Trump administration’s moves to slow regulation increases “is going to be a four-year window that's going to be sort of an anomaly going forward unless, down the road, we have a similarly-minded president.”
Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.
