Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree
Biden, according to one of Trump’s executive orders, imposed $1.7 trillion in regulatory costs on American business. This is a rare instance of Trump low-balling the truth. According to the American Action Forum, a conservative nonprofit, Biden actually imposed $1.8 trillion in regulatory costs, based on self-reported estimates from various federal agencies. (An important caveat is that these up-front estimates are always too high.) Biden imposed a lot of significant regulations to protect the public interest against the excesses of profit-seeking businesses. It’s kind of a shame this got noticed mainly by conservatives who opposed these efforts.
The Environmental Protection Agency accounted for the largest share of that $1.8 billion in regulatory costs due to what’s known as the “tailpipe rule.” This measure, issued last March, will limit the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, light trucks, pickup trucks, and vans starting in 2027. According to AAF, the cost of that rule alone will be $870 billion. The EPA calculated the monetary benefit to the public to be higher, but neither AAF nor the Trump administration cares about that. Trump would like to kill the tailpipe rule; one of his executive orders specifically targets “restrictions on consumer choice of vehicles.”
But to kill the tailpipe rule will require, under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, issuing a proposed rule to revoke it, followed by a comment period, followed by a revised cost-benefit analysis, followed by a final rule. This process takes about a year under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency terminated 388 probationary employees (meaning employees hired within the past two years, who are easiest to fire). The week before it put 200 more employees on administrative leave. More than 1,100 EPA employees have been warned they could be fired at any time, and during Trump’s first term more than 1,200 were either fired or quit. The total EPA workforce today is only about 15,000.
