Do you want more housing? Cut red tape. The National Association of Home Builders states that "regulations account for nearly 25% of the cost of a single-family home."
The MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index found that "51% of small businesses say navigating regulatory compliance requirements is negatively impacting their growth" and that "almost as many (47%) say their business spends too much time fulfilling regulatory compliance requirements."
Some of these compliance regs are sound. Ensuring companies comply with laws on clean water, hazardous waste, and other health and safety requirements is essential to protect citizens. Not all of these "good" regulations are necessary, and enforcement can be overzealous (see "EPA Overreach"). But we're a cleaner, healthier country because of them.
The regulations that homebuilders find burdensome include administrative bottlenecks and long wait times for project approvals, which significantly raise construction costs by increasing carrying costs for builders. Compliance also includes onerous record-keeping requirements that require hiring additional employees to manage them.
American businesses, small and large, are being strangled by red tape. One indication of the amount of red tape being imposed on businesses is the number of pages in the Federal Register.
"While Biden's 2024 Federal Register totaled 106,109 pages—the highest in history—the 2025 volume closed the year with 'only' 61,461 pages (adjusted for blanks and skips), the lowest seen since Trump's first-term tally of 61,067," reports the Competitive Enterprise Institute's (CEI) Clyde Wayne Crews. The CEI's end-of-year analysis of the Trump administration's regulatory policies shows a drop in new regulations not seen since 1993.
True, the Federal Register is only a rough count of regulatory activity; there are other ways the government imposes red tape on the population. Also, the Administrative Procedure Act requires that a rule be issued to repeal a preexisting rule. Theoretically, you could fatten up the Federal Register with nothing but rule rescissions. But the page count is a good starting point for judging the general direction of regulatory activity.
On that point, Trump offers a real contrast to both his predecessor and his successor in the White House. Prior to the Biden administration, BallotPedia reports, "the Federal Register hit an all-time high of 95,894 pages in 2016" under the presidency of Barack Obama (the Law Librarians Society of Washington D.C. puts it at 97,110 pages). That was the first time it exceeded 90,000 pages. The Biden administration broke a new barrier when it exceeded 100,000 pages in 2024. Of course, the rules those pages represent, offset by whatever "unrules" (delays and rescission) are mixed in, accumulate year after year.
CEI's Crews reports that not only is the page count down in the Federal Register, but "final rule counts cratered to 2,441 in 2025. That is not only substantially down from Biden's 3,248 in 2024, it is the lowest total since recordkeeping began in the mid-1970s."
The liberal Brookings Institution notes: "As the Trump administration returns to office for a second term with renewed deregulatory ambitions, the executive branch and its agencies are implementing significant policy changes."
Reason's JD Tuccille says, "...it looks like the second Trump administration is off to a decent start in keeping its January 2025 promise 'to promote prudent financial management and alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens' by ensuring that 'for each new regulation issued, at least 10 prior regulations be identified for elimination.'"
The biggest hurdle for Donald Trump is going to be trying to get Congress to codify many of the regulatory slashes into law so that the next Democratic president who comes along can't kill them with an executive order.
Trump's first term made similar commitments as reviewed in 2020 for the Cato Institute by Keith B. Belton and John D. Graham. They concluded the flow of new regulations was much smaller compared to previous administrations and that the administration was somewhat effective in working with Congress to enact deregulation through legislation. But "Trump's effectiveness as a deregulator has been hampered by a lack of political appointees in key regulatory agencies and a skeptical judicial branch dominated by judges appointed under Democratic administrations."
Among the challenges the first Trump administration faced, Belton and Graham noted, was that by leaving many executive branch offices unfilled, the management of agencies and the enactment of the administration's policies was left in the hands of career staff who didn't necessarily agree with the deregulatory program: "Without the assistance of agency career staff, it is unlikely that deregulatory rulemakings will be completed in a judicially defensible manner."
Trump 2.0 has made better progress in hiring those lower-level staffers who can crack the whip and ensure the permanent bureaucracy does the administration's bidding.
The ball is now in Congress's court. It needs to step up and protect the American people from the overzealous bureaucrats who are constantly looking to exercise their power.
