Trump’s Deregulatory Project Gets Mixed Grade in New Report

President Donald Trump hasn’t made good on his vows to shred the federal rulebook, with the financial burden of regulations essentially unchanged from the final year of the Biden administration, according to findings released Thursday by a pro-free market think tank.

On the other hand, Trump deserves credit for not massively expanding the regulatory state as other presidents have, wrote Clyde Wayne Crews, a regulatory studies fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the report’s author.

The price tag of federal regulations remained $2.2 trillion in 2025, or 7% of US gross domestic product—effectively unchanged from the Biden era, Crews found.

The report suggests Trump underestimated how deeply entrenched institutional structures are, constantly creating new regulations and stymieing the president’s promise to enact “the largest regulatory reduction in the history of our country,” as he vowed on the campaign trail in October 2024.

“Trump’s regulatory streamlining has not actually translated into governing less,” Crews wrote. “As during Trump’s first term, regulation does not necessarily disappear.”

Part of the problem is Trump himself. Executive-driven deregulation is limited “when the presumed streamliner is himself a transaction-oriented interventionist rather than a committed deregulator,” Crews wrote, referring to Trump.

One prominent example of that kind of intervention was the Trump administration’s alleged matchmaking role in helping Larry Ellison, executive chairman and CTO of Oracle, take an ownership stake in TikTok, Crews told Bloomberg Law in an email. Another was Foxconn securing a large US factory after “heavy political courting,” Crews said.

Another reason agencies’ new rules keep popping up is the president has limited control over congressional spending, which Crews called “regulation through other means.” For example, many federal programs have strings attached laying out the terms for labor standards, hiring practices, or buying American, he wrote.

Even so, federal agencies issued only 2,441 new final rules in 2025, the lowest tally of all time, Crews found. Many of those actions were deregulatory. The previous record was 2,964 in 2019, also under Trump. In former President Joe Biden’s last year in office, agencies issued 3,248 final rules.

Crews’ findings are consistent with a recent Bloomberg Law analysis that found only a fraction of the more than 600 deregulatory actions the Trump administration took in 2025 were big-ticket items.

They also mirror the so-so results Trump achieved in his first term. A 2020 academic paper found that, despite Trump’s repeated assertions that his administration had deeply hacked away at the regulatory state, it accomplished far less.

In some cases, the scholars showed Trump’s claims about deregulation were flat-out false, such as when he said in 2020 he had eliminated 25,000 pages from the Federal Register, despite the fact that the page count actually grew 0.5%.

Many public interest groups firmly reject the premise that federal regulations should be reduced, arguing the benefits rulemaking brings far outweigh the costs.