Trump Orders Federal Agencies To Repeal Ten Rules For Each New One, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Protecting The Public Was Still Allowed To Cost More Than Nothing

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order Friday directing every federal agency to identify ten existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to repeal for each new one it wishes to issue, finally ensuring that no protection can be added to the federal code without a tenfold sacrifice of the protections already there.

The order, titled "Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation" and designated Executive Order 14192, goes further still, requiring that the total cost of all new regulations issued in fiscal year 2025, after subtracting the rules deleted to make room for them, "be significantly less than zero." For the first time in the nation's history, the federal government's entire output of public safeguards for the year must, on balance, cost the country less than issuing no safeguards at all.

Under the framework, the Office of Management and Budget will hand each agency a "regulatory budget," an annual ceiling on the amount an agency is permitted to spend protecting the public, with any agency hoping to issue a single new rule (removing a contaminant from drinking water, say, or keeping a rebuilt bridge from collapsing a second time) first required to locate ten existing rules to eliminate and to prove the arithmetic left industry better off. OMB will also decide, at its own discretion, what counts as a "new" rule and what qualifies as an acceptable thing to delete.

"For too long, agencies operated under the outdated assumption that a good rule was worth keeping," said one senior administration official, who praised the order for converting the question of whether a regulation protects Americans into the more manageable question of how much it costs. "We have replaced that assumption with a quota. If you want to save a life, you will first need to find ten lives' worth of paperwork to give up."

The measure expands the President's first-term Executive Order 13771, which had required agencies to repeal only two rules for each new one and which he has described as the most aggressive deregulation in American history, a record the new order surpasses by a factor of five. Trump, who campaigned on a pledge that "for every one new regulation, ten old regulations must be eliminated," has long characterized the federal rulebook as a tax on prosperity, and the order instructs agencies to treat clean-air standards, financial-disclosure requirements, workplace-safety limits, and consumer protections as interchangeable units to be traded against one another until the ledger reads below zero.

At press time, several agencies had concluded that the cheapest and most reliable way to satisfy the order was to stop issuing protective rules altogether, an option administration officials confirmed was both fully compliant and strongly encouraged.

Who Benefits

§President Donald J. Trump, who banks a signature deregulatory accomplishment, fulfills a central campaign promise, and, as the owner of hotels, golf resorts, and real-estate holdings subject to federal environmental, labor, and financial rules, personally benefits from a government now required by quota to delete them.
§The Trump Organization, whose properties face fewer enforceable standards each time an agency clears its regulatory budget by repealing the rules that govern them.
§The Office of Management and Budget and its director, Russell Vought, who gain sweeping discretionary authority to set each agency's regulatory budget, to define what counts as a rule, and thereby to decide from inside the White House which public protections any department is allowed to issue.
§Regulated industries, including fossil fuel producers, chemical manufacturers, banks, and large employers, for whom every new safeguard now arrives only at the price of ten older ones being struck from the books.
§Corporate trade associations and anti-regulatory advocacy groups, including longtime promoters of the "regulatory budget" concept, who watch a decades-old goal become binding executive policy.
§Future deregulation, served by a permanent machinery that makes the repeal of public protections automatic, numerical, and self-justifying.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment