Trump’s seemingly insane plan to cut regulation actually has a solid track record. President Obama has released the details of his “midnight” regulations, meaning those created between the election and the swearing-in of the next president. If implemented, they will cost about $44 billion, according to Sam Batkins of the conservative American Action Forum. They include everything from environmental standards for vehicles to new rules for educational programs.
As strange as it may sound, in the grand scheme of things, $44 billion isn’t that much money. This is the “net present value” of a cost that will be spread out over many years—and we’re a nation of 320 million people, so crude division suggests a burden of around $140 per person. We’re also a nation that already regulates itself to the tune of $6,000 per person per year, so Obama is adding a tiny fraction to the total.
But the midnight package doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is a capstone to eight years of aggressive regulation. And Donald Trump has a much-ridiculed—but actually tested and proven—way of rolling all this back.
To be sure, regulations have been accumulating for decades, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. But even relative to his predecessors, Obama has been particularly happy to add fresh limitations on business and even personal activity.
The libertarian Mercatus Center maintains a system called RegData, containing statistics on decades’ worth of regulatory text. Last year, two of its scholars tallied the total number of restrictions added under each president since Carter. In his first four years, Obama was second only to Carter himself, and by his sixth year Obama had added more restrictions than any other president had in eight. No president, of course, reduced regulation on net.
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