An assessment of the White House’s progress on deregulation

DEREGULATION, along with tax cuts and trade reform, is one of the three pillars of President Donald Trump’s economic agenda. Republicans promise that, freed of red tape, American firms will invest more and unleash faster economic growth. And while Mr Trump has yet to unite his party around a major piece of legislation, the White House has plenty of sway over regulatory policy. For a start, the government agencies Mr Trump commands can regulate and deregulate on their own (subject only to the instructions that Congress has given them in the past). How much red tape have they managed to tear down since Mr Trump took office?

Regulation is difficult to measure precisely, but the long-term trend towards excessive rulemaking has been obvious. In 1970 there were about 400,000 prescriptive words such as “shall” or “must” in the code of federal regulations, according to the Mercatus Centre, a libertarian-leaning think-tank. Today there are 1.1m (see chart). Wonks of many stripes agree that this is far too many and that the rule book must be shortened. Agencies have rarely combed over old edicts to see whether they are worth keeping. The problem predated Barack Obama’s administration; both Republicans and Democrats have presided over regulatory expansions. That said, Mr Obama was an unusually prolific rule-writer, because for much of his presidency a hostile Congress meant that regulation was often his best tool.