Former President Donald Trump and Republicans would work to dismantle many of the federal rules imposed under President Joe Biden should they gain control of the government in November.
Trump allies and congressional Republicans have been plotting how to undo the rulemaking under the Biden administration and roll back the expansion of the administrative state, a term used to describe executive branch agencies that have the power to write and enforce rules with little input or direction from Congress.
The effort would be multi-faceted. Trump would unilaterally try to revise, revamp, and toss out Biden-era rules through the power of executive orders. Congress and Trump jointly would attempt to scrap rules passed during Biden’s last year using the Congressional Review Act, a tool that allows for expedited votes to cancel recently imposed regulations. Lastly, Republican lawmakers would pass legislation to overhaul Biden rules — and reform the rulemaking and approval process itself.
Rulemaking under Biden has exploded, infuriating Republicans, who see it as a way for the president to make major changes without the consent of Congress.
“Every single one of us in the Republican House are working really hard and anticipating a return of Trump to the White House,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL), one of the key Republicans plotting regulatory reform, told the Washington Examiner. “We believe that a rollback of all of the executive action that Biden took, which has effectively crippled our economy and so many of our industries — that’s going to be step one when we’re talking about the regulatory regime.”
During an interview, Cammack also said Republicans will be taking a serious look at bureaucracy itself, which she branded the fourth branch of government. She said that for some time, but particularly under the Biden administration, “nameless, faceless, unelected” bureaucrats have taken a legislative-like role.
Trump would also aim to overhaul the administrative state by changing its staff. Trump has said he plans on bringing back an executive order to reclassify the employment status of tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats who are deemed to have some form of influence over policy, making them easier to fire.
The reclassification would cover some 50,000 policy-influencing positions in the federal government, said James Sherk, the America First Policy Institute’s director of the Center for American Freedom. The America First Policy Institute is one of the main groups developing a conservative policy platform that can be used by a future presidential administration. The reclassification would make it so that, if a civil servant classified as such isn’t doing a good job or carrying out the president’s agenda, they could be removed fairly easily.
“I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively,” Trump said in a video posted to a website laying out his planned agenda for a second term.
“Anything that can be done through executive action can be rolled back the same way,” Sherk said. He predicted it might take some time to reinstate the policy but that it could likely be accomplished by late summer 2025.
The Biden administration is working hard to push through as many rules as possible to stop Trump from undoing them through the Congressional Review Act.
That is because Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress can easily reverse final regulations using the Congressional Review Act if those rules are introduced 60 working days before this session of Congress ends. The deadline for that is thought to be around the end of May. The Biden administration has finalized more than 300 regulations in April alone, according to the Federal Register.
“They’ve got to flood the zone,” said Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, about the current push. “But they have to get it all in by a certain date, or otherwise it would be subject to being overturned in a potential new administration.”
Crews said Trump’s team has likely begun planning to begin reversing course on Biden-era rulemaking on the first day of his presidency.
“Every president always freezes proposed rules,” Crews told the Washington Examiner. “That’s No. 1. So the first thing Trump would do is freeze rules.”
Crews said Trump is also expected to restore his executive order that required that, for every single new rule or regulation, two old regulations on the books must be eliminated.
Congress is teeing up a whole slate of legislation designed to target the administrative state if Trump is able to win power. Crews said that if Republicans win the trifecta of House, Senate, and the White House, it will probably mark the biggest rework of the administrative state in recent history.
Cammack said she would pursue “codifying the reassertion of Article I” of the Constitution. That article explicitly states that all legislative powers are to be vested in the House and Senate.
The Florida congresswoman has a bill, referred to as the REINS Act, that seeks to do that. The Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act targets rulemaking from the executive branch and would mandate that every new “major rule” proposed by federal agencies must be approved by both the House and Senate before going into effect.
The REINS Act describes a “major rule” as any federal rule or regulation that may result in an annual economic effect of more than $100 million, a major increase in consumer prices, or adverse effects on competition, employment, and investment, among other strictures.
“REINS Act is critically important because it gives a long-term certainty for the economy, for consumers, for industry, that the people who are elected to represent folks back home are actually going to have a say in long-term consequences and effects of what the administration is doing,” Cammack said this week.
The Republican Party is now largely unified in pushing for regulatory reform, with various lawmakers giving a preview of what could be expected in a GOP trifecta in the form of legislation introduced ahead of the election.
Earlier this year, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) introduced a bill, dubbed the Sunset Act, that would require all major rules to expire 10 years after they are enacted unless approved by both chambers of Congress under a joint resolution.
Emmer tore into Biden’s legacy of rulemaking.
“The Biden administration’s regulatory overreach is killing this country,” he told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “When Republicans take back the White House, flip the Senate, and keep the House in November, we’re going to pound a stake into the heart of Biden’s bloated administrative state.”
There have been some major and controversial rules implemented under Biden.
For example, in March, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to approve a rule that requires large corporations to report greenhouse gas emissions.
Another big rule that raised concerns among Republicans, and even some Democrats, was one from the Labor Department, which allows retirement plan managers to weigh environmental and social issues when making investments. The rule — part of a broader push to promote environmental, social, and governance priorities — allows, though does not require, fiduciaries to weigh ESG factors when making investment decisions for retirement accounts.
The GOP will also take aim at Biden administration climate rules. For instance, in late March, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that enacts stronger tailpipe emission standards for vehicles, such as freight trucks and buses, created between 2027 and 2032. Last month, the agency finalized rules to limit power plant emissions that Republicans say would shutter coal plants.
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Sherk predicted that, if Trump wins, the remaking of the administrative state in 2025 will likely be even more profound than during his first term, which spanned from 2017 to 2021.
“If the unelected bureaucracy gets to set the policy, gets to set the agenda, and the bureaucracy gets to determine how the law is going to be implemented, without accountability to elected officials, then that means that we don’t truly have government by the consent of the governed,” Sherk said.