Two trillion dollars.   

Every year. Year after year.  

That’s the cost of federal regulations to Americans.  

And all of this is finally in the crosshairs.  

President Donald Trump and this Republican Congress are engaged in the first well-planned, serious, focused, all-hands-on-deck challenge to this fourth branch of government that is rarely — okay, never — mentioned in the Constitution.   

Yes, the second Trump administration started off with the Big Beautiful Bill, which made his 2017 tax cuts larger and permanent. That made sense. Americans have a good grasp of their tax burden. Federal income taxes are deducted from each paycheck. Ditto for Social Security and Medicare. Property taxes are as visible as they are painful. Sales taxes show up on the receipt. The gas tax is advertised at every gas station. 

But at the same time, the Trump administration has been moving forward on a second front: deregulation. This effort can be as powerful and revolutionary as tax reduction. 

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Trump wasted no time breaking the regulatory stranglehold placed on American energy by the Biden administration. During his four years in office, Biden imposed nearly $2 trillion in new regulations, 72 percent of which were implemented through the Environmental Protection Agency. These disastrous EPA regulations drive up the cost of living for Americans by making everything from home electricity to the price of a new car more expensive.

Lee Zeldin, President Trump’s EPA administrator, came into office and immediately launched a slate of thirty-one major deregulatory actions aimed at unleashing American energy and lowering the cost of living for American families.  

Among these actions was the crucial rollback of the faulty Obama-era “Endangerment Finding,” which had declared that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide constitute a threat to “public health and welfare.” This finding had been used to justify a sweeping new regulatory authority that implemented over $1 trillion in regulatory costs on the U.S. economy. These regulations were specifically aimed at sacrificing gas-powered cars on the altar of climate change. 

In June, President Trump signed legislation revoking Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. The EV mandate had granted state regulators in California the de facto power to implement a nationwide, 100 percent ban on new gas-powered cars by 2035. This would have priced millions of Americans out of the new car market and killed jobs in the auto industry. 

By revoking the special waiver granted to California by the Biden administration, the Trump EPA is ensuring that Democrats can’t force their radical climate agenda on the entire auto industry through one state’s regulatory regime. This decision restores consumer choice to the auto market, allowing car manufacturers to build affordable cars that people want to buy. Big problem solved.

The cost of regulations is hidden. Yes, on purpose. The cost is not just the higher prices for goods and services, but in delayed new inventions. The first mobile phone was invented in 1946, but the Federal Communications Commission blocked further development the next year. Carriers weren’t able to bring cell phones as we know them to market until 1982. 

The federal government collected $4.9 trillion in taxes in 2024. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, founded by the late Fred Smith, calculates that in 2025 the federal government regulatory burden was $2 trillion. $2 trillion to make cars lethargic, washing machines drearily slow and limp-wristed, shower heads insultingly unsocial, and everything more expensive. 

Before Reagan, the “experts” told us we could not ever cut taxes. The deficit, you know. But tax rates were cut by 25 percent across the board, and the economy created four million jobs in the first year of the full tax cut, 1983. Tax revenue also went up, driven by growth, job creation, and investment. 

Regulation costs have grown faster than taxes. Nixon gave us the EPA and more. Congressman Dick Armey of Texas calculated that, when George H. W. Bush left the White House, fully 25 percent of the total cost of federal regulations had been imposed by this “Republican” presidency. George W. Bush brought us the expensive, burdensome, investment-stifling Sarbanes–Oxley regulatory regime.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, the first of the “independent” regulatory bodies, was imposed in 1887 to keep railroad prices down. Soon, it became obvious that the Interstate Commerce Commission created monopoly rents for existing railroads, and then trucking, and later the Federal Aviation Administration did the same for airlines.  

But it is possible to win battles against amorphous overregulation.

During the Carter administration (yes, you read that correctly), legislation was passed to deregulate air travel, and prices fell dramatically. Trucking and railroads were soon deregulated as well, and they experienced the same effects. The cost of transporting goods across America fell by 20 percent. This effort was bipartisan, but one notes that it likely would not have been as successful if Reagan had not followed Carter and seriously implemented deregulation. 

It is difficult — okay, impossible — to imagine a bipartisan effort on this front today, given that the Democrat Party is incapable of doing anything that President Trump supports. 

On labor policy, the Trump administration did something that Reagan, Bush, Bush Jr., and Ford never did. They examined the law signed by Jimmy Carter allowing the unionization of most federal employees and noticed that the law forbade unions from forming in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, CIA, FBI, and — here is the long-overlooked kicker — any department that the president deems necessary for national defense.

If the president — not the Congress, not PBS, not the “experts” or “scientists,” but simply the president alone — could ban unionization in, say, the Pentagon, Veterans Affairs, etc., then the president alone can ban unions in the IRS (which brags it is critical to national security because it “gets” the money needed to pay for the Army, etc.).

So far, one million of the two million federal government employees have been freed from the unions that were shut down by the Trump executive memo. The ban on unions also forbids the union bosses from getting free office space paid for by taxpayers. A number of Americans — and the Washington press — were apparently unaware of this taxpayer-funded goodie for the union bosses. Or at least they did not think it worth reporting.

Trump is also unwinding Biden orders that attacked the status of independent contractors. Trump recognizes that these Americans wish to be their own boss. But Democrats want them to have a boss — preferably a union boss — who can collect “dues.” Independent contractors cannot be unionized, therefore the progressives want to forcibly “classify” them as W-2 employees.

National labor law was imposed on American workers — forcing them to pay dues for the privilege of having union leaders determine their wages and work — through the 1935 Wagner Act. Since then, there have been three waves of deregulation, two of which were driven by President Trump. Right-to-work laws, which allow states to decide for themselves whether their citizens can opt out of any union imposed at their workplace, were made possible by the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. Today, twenty-six states forbid private-sector unions from collecting dues from workers who do not wish to join.

The Supreme Court ruled in the 2018 case Janus v. AFSCME that all state and local elected officials have the right to work. All states are now right-to-work states for public-sector workers. Since the 2018 decision, state and local employees have refused to be “axed” by the union bosses. Freedom Foundation helps public-sector workers leave their unions, and the group notes it helped 35,000 employees leave government unions in 2023, which translates to “a financial impact of approximately $91,200 lost to unions every single day of the year.” 

Tax reform provided another form of deregulation. Americans spend eight billion hours each year filling out their taxes. With the passage of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the standard deduction for couples was nearly doubled, from $13,000 to $24,000. Now, 90 percent (up from 70 percent before Trump) of Americans do not have to hunt for every receipt from a charity to complete their tax returns. Most Americans can simply file without the paperwork and without the fear that they are missing the proper deductions. 

Trump’s IRS announced the end of efforts to create a “Direct File” program. This was Biden’s unauthorized attempt to turn the IRS into both tax preparer and tax auditor, an inherent conflict of interest in which the IRS has every motive to ensure taxpayers have the highest tax bill rather than the highest tax return. Over time, the IRS stood to infringe on your privacy by hoovering up more and more of your financial transaction details in order to “do your taxes for you.”

For the sake of your medicine cabinet, Trump directed the FDA to simplify the long and costly process of drug development. New medicines can reach patients sooner, and the process for moving drugs to over-the-counter status has also been improved.

Trump is also working to abolish regulations that impose daily annoyances, such as the “stop-start” feature in your car. EPA administrator Zeldin said of the initiative on X: “Start/stop technology: where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.” 

By Bill Wilson for The American Spectator

Deregulation can strengthen the American economy as surely as tax reductions did for Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump.

And we need it. 

Since the American Revolution against the larger British Empire, the United States has never gone to war with a nation whose economy exceeded 40 percent of the size of the American economy. 

The Chinese economy is 60 percent the size of America’s. That’s outside the comfort zone.   

We need to deregulate now.   

Trump is only getting warmed up.

Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.

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