Eakinomics: Regulation
Reform and the Courts
Eakinomics has devoted considerable attention to the Trump
Administration’s efforts to control the regulatory state. With the
imposition of regulatory budgets on the Cabinet agencies and enforcement
by the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs, the growth in overall regulatory burden has been dramatically
slowed, and at times reversed altogether.
At the same time, AAF’s Daniel Bosch and Bernard Zamaninia point out that
many of the Trump Administration's rules face legal challenges and
reports abound regarding resistance to implementing
the changes. The
Washington Post, for example, characterized the
situation as an “extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied
large parts of the president’s agenda.” Is it really possible that many
of the rules were finalized – thus getting credit for meeting
the regulatory budget – but stopped by the legal system – thus not actually
changing the policy?
The answers are in “Estimating the Economic Value of Trump
Administration Rules Blocked by Legal Action,” which finds
that “while many of the Trump Administration’s actions have indeed been
blocked by courts, relatively few of its deregulatory actions with
significant economic savings have been halted. In fact, its regulatory
actions (those rules with net economic costs) are successfully challenged
in court at a higher rate than its deregulatory actions.”
Specifically, they look at 110 blocked rules. Of those, only 14 had
significant economic impacts. The authors conclude, “The net economic
impact of those 14 cases is $1.8 billion in savings, or less than 2
percent of the net economic impact of all Trump Administration rules
($108 billion in savings).”
The Trump regulatory reforms are no illusion. They remain one of the
principal economic achievements of the administration.
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