With little fanfare, the Trump administration has gone on a regulation-cutting binge, eliminating Biden- and Obama-era rules while slashing the bureaucracy built to impose costly restrictions on Wall Street and Main Street.

Early indications from a key regulation watcher confirm that President Donald Trump is not just making good on a campaign promise to cut 10 regulations for every new one his team proposes, but has also paused issuing new regulations.

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The change from the Biden approach is so radical that Washington’s regulation watchdog, Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, dubbed the new campaign the “Unrule.”

He said, “What we’re witnessing is the rise of the ‘Unrule,’ a revolt against the machinery of the administrative state.”

In a pending blog post shared with Washington Secrets, he said that many of the rules the Trump administration is imposing are actually targeting those on the books for elimination. “Many of the so-called ‘rules’ that have appeared this year aren’t new mandates at all. They’re reversals, delays, withdrawals — and a government-wide recognition that certain, perhaps most, regulations are not merely unjustified but actively harmful.”

Crews added that some deregulatory moves are significant, such as pulling back the Biden Environmental Protection Agency’s demand for clean vehicles, which Detroit said was unrealistic.

In a related post he wrote for Forbes, he compared the administration’s actions to the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951).

Trump and his team have a solid record of rule-cutting. In his first term, he promised to eliminate two for every one his administration implemented. He actually achieved a near four-to-one rate.

And as they cut rules and regulations, the administration has also drained the “swamp” of unelected bureaucrats who write and impose those rules, said Crews.

“Agencies are being defunded, downsized, and in some cases shuttered. Guidance documents and sub-regulatory decrees — once used to bypass notice-and-comment rulemaking — are now in the crosshairs as well,” said Crews.

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Crews has long urged Congress to take the action Trump has taken in his first six months, and he hopes the president’s moves prompt Republicans to help with the rule-cutting.

“These executive branch changes provide a big lesson for a Congress, whose action is necessary for the necessary thorough deconstruction. When the bureaucracy gets put in time out, nobody but the vast industry surrounding it misses it, and the economy, jobs, and public health and safety get a boost. Congress now should pick up the baton from the administration and defund bureaucracy, restrict and prevent its operations, and abolish it. Actually it should have done that ages ago,” said Crews.