Trump’s Swift Deregulation Strategy Falls Flat With Agencies

A White House plan to rapidly repeal regulations has flopped, with just a handful of rules dumped via the expanded use of an administrative shortcut since a widespread review effort was ordered more than a year ago.

President Donald Trump last spring called on federal regulators to quickly ax policies using the Administrative Procedure Act’s good cause exception, which allows for agencies to act without going through the normal notice-and-comment process. Trump instructed agencies to use the fast-track process—typically invoked for routine, noncontroversial matters, as well as genuine emergencies—to scrap rules that run afoul of recent US Supreme Court precedent, including several that weakened agency power.

Agencies have largely declined to follow that White House strategy, a Bloomberg Law analysis of rulemakings shows. While the second Trump administration has pushed the boundaries of executive power in novel ways, ex-government regulators and administrative law observers say the limited adoption of Trump’s deregulatory moonshot signals that agencies lack confidence in the legal rationale behind it.

“It exceeded even what political lawyers in the Trump administration are willing to justify,” said Sam Berger, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as associate administrator of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Biden administration.

Agencies’ hesitancy to follow through, even after subsequent prodding from the White House budget office, underscores the Trump administration’s struggles to live up to its rhetoric touting radical deregulation. The administration has made major changes to defang the regulatory state, including shifting enforcement priorities and slashing agency personnel, although some of those moves might be easier for future administrations to reverse compared to ditching rules.

The White House didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the limited use of the good cause exemption. The White House Office of Management and Budget last fall urged agencies to look for more opportunities to further the administration’s aims of cutting regulatory red tape at an “unprecedented scale” and ensuring that regulations that remain on the books are legal.

“Those directives reflect the reasoned judgment that reflexive adherence to the APA’s default process requirements is improper for facially unlawful regulations,” the budget office said of Trump’s policy orders. “All agencies should be adhering to the plain text of the APA and President’s directives.”

Good Cause Bypass

Quickly chopping rafts of regulations emerged as an administration priority even before Trump began his second term.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy debuted the broad strokes of a proposal to leverage Supreme Court authority to fast-track deregulation in a Wall Street Journal column on transforming government that published shortly after Trump’s November 2024 election victory.

Trump issued an executive order in February 2025 giving agencies 60 days to identify regulations that clashed with the law or administration policy. He followed that up with an April 2025 memo that set forth the specifics of his expedited deregulation policy.

The strategy was rooted in a series of landmark administrative law rulings the Supreme Court issued since 2015, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended judicial deference to agency interpretation of unclear laws, and West Virgina v. EPA, which solidified the court’s major questions doctrine requiring explicit congressional authorization to regulate highly important topics.

Trump’s memo declared that rules that are inconsistent with those 10 rulings qualify for the good-cause exemption, which covers situations when the regulatory process would be “impractical, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” Courts have generally held that the full process is unnecessary when agencies issue rules that are of little or no interest to the public, and that serious threats to public safety can render rulemaking impractical and contrary to the public interest, according to a congressional analysis of the exception.

Trump’s memo argued that keeping unlawful regulations on the books would be against the public interest, and that the full process wouldn’t be needed when repeal is necessary as a matter of law.

“Agencies thus have ample cause and the legal authority to immediately repeal unlawful regulations,” the White House said in the memo.

Anti-DEI Efforts

A little over a month after Trump’s April memo, the US Department of Energy was the first agency out of the gate to say one of those 10 high court rulings justified axing a regulation.

The Energy Department’s direct final rule said a loan program for minority-owned businesses conflicts with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 decision ending race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions. It was one of more than a dozen rules the agency published on the same day, including several that involved dumping regulations related to nondiscrimination requirements that the agency deemed outdated, unnecessary, unconstitutional, or based on a deficient reading of the law.

Since then, the initiative hasn’t gained much traction.

Bloomberg Law searched the Federal Register for any regulations released since Trump’s memo that referenced the 10 Supreme Court cases. While the administration has published about 2,800 rules since the close of the mandated regulatory review period, only two other agencies have used the good cause exception based on one of the cases that the White House highlighted. That pair of deregulatory measures also featured the high court’s decision against affirmative action.

The Department of Health and Human Services axed a program that gave colleges grants to increase the number of minority men and women involved in biomedical research, while the Transportation Department pointed to Students for Fair Admissions as grounds for summarily stripping race- and sex-based presumptions of social and economic disadvantage from two small business initiatives.

For other agencies, the legal risk of trying to defend summarily withdrawing a rule based on one of the listed high court cases appeared to outweigh its benefits, said Will Yeatman, deputy director of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center.

“Implementation of the plan wasn’t robust because implementation would have been impossible in many instances,” said Yeatman, who emphasized that most of the Supreme Court precedents on the list don’t seem to apply generally to agency regulations.

Following the Plan

Bloomberg Law also searched the government’s regulatory recordbook for instances of agencies citing Trump’s memo in their decisionmaking.

Agencies have cited Trump’s quickie deregulation policy in eight other withdrawals since last April, with varied justifications for why the measure at issue was unlawful.

The Railroad Retirement Board, for example, cited a 1975 Supreme Court decision nixing a sex-based distinction related to Social Security benefits to throw out a gender disparity in eligibility for annuities under the Railroad Retirement Act.

The Farm Credit Administration ditched diversity requirements for institutions in a lending network because it allegedly violated a Trump executive order against DEI programs in the federal government.

But some of the repeals seem to be “bona fide uses of the exemption that any administration might have accepted,” like the Treasury Department withdrawing requirements related to the shuttered Troubled Asset Relief Program, said Ronald Levin, an administrative law scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

“In such cases the agencies may have relied on the executive order as a makeweight or an easy way to signal alignment with the administration’s goals, even if they could justify the repeal on conventional APA grounds anyway,” he said.

OMB Prodding

Six months after Trump’s memo, OMB followed up with another memo urging agencies to apply the administration’s good cause theory. The regulatory office acknowledged the slow uptake of Trump’s deregulatory review and repeal effort, and offered additional legal justifications for carrying out the president’s mandate.

“To date, agencies do not appear to be fully maximizing their energy in carrying out these directives,” it said.

The memo pointed to rulings from the Third and Seventh circuits that upheld the use of the good cause exemption when laws imposed time limits for rulemaking that were too tight to allow for notice and comment. Repealing unlawful regulations is most like complying with a statutory deadline, OMB argued.

While agencies have advanced some significant deregulatory actions since that OMB message—headlined by the Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of its legal basis for regulating greenhouse gasses—no agencies have since attempted to claim the good cause exception based on the 10 Supreme Court cases.

Nevertheless, the administration continues to promote elements of the policy. EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi said at a recent Federalist Society convention that rulings like Loper Bright and Sackett help the agency cut regulations from the Obama and Biden administrations.

Beyond Deregulation

To University of Chicago administrative law professor Jennifer Nou, Trump’s plan is just another version of the broad deregulatory initiatives that presidents have tried over the past 40 years. For example, Nou worked on a regulatory review project for the Obama administration aimed at streamlining agency rules during her time as a senior adviser at OIRA.

These initiatives have had limited success because repealing regulations requires an investment of often-scant agency resources that takes away from other priorities, Nou said. The Trump administration’s deep cuts to staffing have reduced agency bandwidth even further, she noted.

Unless “counting scalps” of repealed rules is the primary concern, deregulation for deregulation’s sake isn’t a good use of agency resources, said Stephen Calkins, a former Federal Trade Commission general counsel.

Rather than quickly rolling back policies using a rationale that would be difficult to defend in court, agencies have gotten more bang for their buck with enforcement actions, letters, and other less costly tools, said Calkins, now a law professor at Wayne State University.

The Trump administration has had significant impacts on the administrative state regardless of agencies not following through on the White House’s quickie deregulation theory, said Brandon Johnson, an administrative law professor at the University of Nebraska. Some agencies have been gutted or had top officials fired, while others have reoriented their enforcement efforts to match Trump’s priorities, he said.

“Just because a rule is still on the books, it doesn’t mean much if nobody is willing to enforce the rule or nobody is in office to enforce the rule,” Johnson said.