President-elect Donald Trump has touted in a Truth Social post that Congress is “getting to work on one powerful Bill that will bring our Country back, and make it greater than ever before.” However, a Columbus, Ohio-based think tank says the incoming chief executive should fully “tame the administrative state.”
“Mr. Trump has vowed to ‘make America safe, strong, prosperous, powerful, and free again,’” Andrew M. Grossman, a senior legal fellow at The Buckeye Institute, wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner. “He can succeed, but only if he takes on the bloated, controlling, and growth-sapping administrative state he’ll inherit from the outgoing administration.”
Grossman said he expects Trump to start by halting in-progress rules that are pending review. However, the soon-to-be 47th president can “improve on precedent” by extending such an order to “independent agencies,” such as the Federal Trade Commission.
The incoming president should also “end independent agencies’ exemption from the centralized regulatory review process administered by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget,” Grossman wrote. “That will improve the quality of their regulatory analyses and actions and ensure that they aren’t working at cross-purposes with other agencies.”
Trump should also reverse President Joe Biden’s order exempting regulatory actions that impose up to $200 million in annual economic costs from review and reinstate the longstanding $100 million threshold.
“Mr. Biden also directed all agencies to ‘recognize distributive impacts and equity’ in rulemaking—bureaucratese for embedding progressive ideology on race, gender, and more into federal policy,” Grossman wrote. “To Mr. Biden’s credit, these weren’t just words; his administration followed through by piling on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at every opportunity, to the detriment of achieving government priorities. Mr. Trump should not only wipe the slate clean, but direct officials at every level to prioritize achievement of programmatic objectives, efficiency, and U.S. competitiveness.
“More important than reversing Mr. Biden’s policy blunders is Mr. Trump’s positive agenda to reduce regulatory burdens,” Grossman added. “To begin with, Mr. Trump should reissue his pioneering 2017 executive order requiring agencies to repeal two existing regulations for each new one and to offset the costs of new regulations with repeals.”
The Buckeye Institute has advocated for Ohio leaders to tackle the administrative state at the state level.
Trump appears poised to overhaul the country’s regulatory framework. He repeatedly signaled the need to cut regulations as he named members to posts in his upcoming administration.
“Together, we will defeat Inflation, rapidly bring down Prices, secure the Southern Border, cut Taxes and Regulations, reignite Growth, build the Greatest Economy in History and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in a November statement announcing Vince Haley as director of the domestic policy council.
Grossman said greater gains can be had by reviving and expanding the Department of Health and Human Services’ Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely (SUNSET) rule, a Trump policy that Biden repealed. Under the policy, most of the department’s regulations would have expired within a decade unless an in-depth review concluded that they should remain.
Four years should give Trump “ample time to entrench sunset-based retroactive review across the government,” Grossman wrote.
“Finally, if Mr. Trump is to have any hope of rolling back the administrative state and achieving his other campaign promises, he’ll need a federal workforce that recognizes his authority as president,” Grossman wrote. “As the saying goes, ‘personnel is policy.’ Mr. Trump’s response to bureaucratic resistance in his first term came belatedly in the form of a 2020 executive order reclassifying high-level positions out of the competitive civil service and into a new “Schedule F” classification subject to greater presidential control.
“The federal workforce’s reported despair at Mr. Trump’s return to office indicates that the need for Schedule F is unchanged,” Grossman added. “What’s different is that Mr. Trump has the time to pursue reform. The best approach is to begin with an executive order that allows agencies to prepare and puts would-be resistors on notice, and then speed through notice and comment to a final rule within three to four months.”
