DOGE’s Quick Start Guide To Slashing Regulations

Coming on the heels of a one-in, ten-out directive for federal regulations, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14219, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Regulatory Initiative.” The new order sets up the regulatory streamlining apparatus and agenda at federal agencies.

The objective—with the help of Elon Musk’s DOGE—is to “focus the executive branch’s limited enforcement resources on regulations squarely authorized by constitutional Federal statutes, and to commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” The campaign is likely to figure into Trump’s 2025 Address to Congress as well.

Preventing A DOGE Dodge

This directive requires agency heads—in coordination with their “DOGE Team Leads” and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—to “initiate a process to review all regulations subject to their sole or joint jurisdiction for consistency with law and Administration policy.”

Trump’s directive echoes his own 2017 E.O. 13,777 “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda,” which designated Regulatory Reform Officers at agencies and set up Regulatory Reform Task Forces to implement “regulatory reform initiatives and policies.”

But there is a significant shift in tone and emphasis between these two campaigns, indicative of lessons learned in the interim. Both set up new offices, but the 2017 rendition featured conventional platitudes about economic efficiency that largely still prevail among regulatory reform geekdom, such as reforming regulations that harm job creation, have costs that exceed benefits or are “outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective.”

This new more transformative directive comes from a different, battle-hardened outlook and calls for the development of “a Unified Regulatory Agenda that seeks to rescind or modify these regulations,” specifically invoking “deconstruction” of an administrative state now largely regarded as unconstitutional and irredeemable.

Therefore, in addition to the standard fare of targeting rules with hefty costs that don’t match their benefits, the aggressive new emphasis is on spotting regulations the administration deems unconstitutional, that stem from illegal power grabs, that stray from a strict reading of the laws they’re allegedly based on, that attempt to tackle major social, political, or economic issues without clear legal backing, and that disrupt progress—such as by blocking innovation and technological breakthroughs, infrastructure deployment and energy production.

These criteria unambiguously parallel recent Supreme Court decisions curtailing the administrative state, setting the stage for calculated judicial confrontations not just to roll back some rules but to challenge the legality of an entire expansive bureaucracy that this administration clearly regards as suspect and on unsound footing.

My colleague Iain Murray at the Competitive Enterprise Institute highlighted the new and highly animating legal backdrop in The Daily Economy:

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“[B]efore President Trump’s election the Supreme Court began the process of restoring constitutional government in a series of decisions. Seila Law reasserted the President’s control over senior officials. The assertion of what is known as the Major Questions Doctrine in West Virginia vs EPA held that the executive cannot act on what would be a major political question if Congress has not considered it and legislated accordingly. Then Loper Bright overturned the Chevron Doctrine, removing automatic judicial deference to agency interpretation of the law.

What was needed, however, was an administration willing to act on these new legal principles. That appears to have come to fruition with DOGE.”

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Trump’s order instructs agencies to “prioritize review of those rules that satisfy the definition of ‘significant regulatory action’ in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993 (Regulatory Planning and Review).” That done, the directive specifies that within 60 days, “agency heads shall provide to the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget a list of all regulations identified” as fitting the foregoing criteria for recission and modification.

To Get Started, DOGE Can Walk Through An Open Door

The “significant regulatory actions” that Trump prioritizes are those defined in E.O. 12,866 as having annual economic effects of at least $100 million; the category also includes rules significant for reasons beyond conventional cost assessments, such as their effects on federal spending or in raising novel legal or governance issues. “Significant” actions over the past three decades have ranged from a low of 69 under Trump in 2019 to a high of 545 under Barack Obama in 2016. There were 342 under Biden in 2024.

E.O. 12866’s $100 million threshold is shared with rules deemed “major” by the Congressional Review Act (CRA) and the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act. Major rules, somewhat regularly assessed by OMB, can form a foundation for the first stage of “deconstruction” during the 60-day survey period. While there will be emphasis on this costly foundational layer, the surprisingly small population of these rules portrays, not that there aren’t many costly rules, but instead the extent to which the regulatory state is not quantified at all and needs greater transparency. While major rules mark the foundation upon which the administration and DOGE can build its targets, the broader category of “significant” rules and as well as other regulatory actions need to be addressed.

To kick things off, a starter list for DOGE follows. Using OMB’s annual Report to Congress on the costs and benefits of regulation dating back to 2001, we find (only) 478 “major” rules for which OMB has reviewed and disclosed quantified costs. By comparison, however, DOGE must remain aware that over 3,000 rules are typically issued each year. Using OMB figures, these 478 were assessed to impose costs of up to $282 billion yearly, as the table below summarizes.

Overall, the table captures 22 years of major rules (fiscal years 2002-2023) in the following categories:

For deeper dives to locate specific major rules for E.O. 14219 termination, the links in the above bullets provide full inventories and Regulation Identifier Numbers (RINs) of the 478 rules at hand, broken out by departments and agencies.

DOGE and the administration will discover that progressives deny the significance of or even reality of regulatory costs. They ignore compounding, ripple effects of regulatory interventions, in part by insisting that costs of the earlier-issued in OMB’s lonesome compilations no longer apply owing to technological advancement.

Note that a glaring gap in the above table is fiscal year 2024 (which ended back in September), on which OMB has not yet reported. However this author has compiled roundups of rules from 2024 which Congress and the administration might also survey to extract those meeting the termination criteria of E.O. 14219. As it happens, calendar year 2024 saw a large surge in major rules that deserves urgent attention, as the chart below illustrates. (For the complete 2024 list, see this “Inventory Of Biden Regulations To Overturn Quickly In The 119th Congress.”)

While “significant regulatory actions” will likely comprise the foundation of the Trump deconstruction, the foregoing, one hopes, illustrates the limits of relying upon what OMB has at times reluctantly disclosed as official primary costly regulations. Observers will note that regulations on the lists linked in the above bullets feature redundancies, in that agencies frequently revisit some of the same subject matter–such as energy efficiency standards, auto safety rules, importation of foods, environmental rules and more. Major rules, despite the name, only scratch the surface of federal intervention in society; OMB, agencies and DOGE therefore need to think more broadly.

A Bigger Net Is Necessary

While they are the obvious starting point, DOGE and the administration will never successfully slash the administrative state by targeting solely the rules designated significant by the 1993 E.O. 12866. The overarching reason is that—with a federal government as large as ours—notice and comment rules are not sufficient proxies for costs of what amounts to largely unbounded federal intervention. Guidance forthcoming from OMB on the implementations of Trump’s E.O. 14219 might be able to articulate an approach accounting for this in a manner that DOGE Team Leads can operationalize before the timeframe is up. Concerns to be addressed include:

• While the table above includes 22 departments and agencies, 441 exist according to the National Archives. In addition, as noted, there are thousands of significant rules for which no cost tabulations were performed at all during the timespan above, let alone benefits. On the bright side, the population of significant rules should be a gold mine for DOGE fans to excavate over the coming two months. But that’s not much time.
• Despite the attention the OMB calculus gets, independent agencies have never received the E.O. 12866 treatment despite being their being among the most significant regulators. This class of actors includes the likes of the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. All have been historically omitted from the foregoing counts and costs, a circumstance that only changed recently with Trump’s E.O. 14215 “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies.” Discipline of independent agencies is essential, and Trump enabled it just before his deconstruction order. Guidance from OMB to agencies on the containment of independent agencies’ rules is vital at this juncture.
• Sub-regulatory guidance documents, as they had been characterized in a George W. Bush-era executive order, can sometimes be deployed to achieve regulatory aims without issuing notice-and-comment rules. While guidance documents are incorporated in Trump’s new review-and-termination order—yet another important innovation—these have historically remained undisciplined and uncatalogued until Trump’s own E.O. 13891 of 2019 generated the makings of an inventory. Biden rescinded Trump’s portals, and there is little time to reconstruct them now. The DOGE team and agencies should nonetheless be aware that an unofficial tally by this author still finds over 103,000 such documents accessible, thanks purely to Trump’s order that opened the curtains on this cryptic category of regulatory intervention. A mad scramble is in order.
• Last but not least—well actually, not last either, however we have but 60 days —none of the above implicates contracting and procurement avenues now prominent for laundering regulation. It happens to be the case, however, that Donald Trump’s E.O. 14222 “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative,” is capable of extreme supplementation of E.O. 14219 by identifying and targeting these discretionary contracts and grants. Closing this loophole for backdoor regulation is vital. Since spending is regulation in certain obvious “strings-attached” instances, Trump should be able to claim certain rollbacks of grant and contract specifications in fulfilment of his one-in, ten-out campaign as a bonus. OMB guidance should provide some direction here, as it is apparent that Trump’s orders reinforce one another.

For Permanent Reductions, Legislative Reinforcement OF E.O. 14219 Is Needed

Given today’s weighty federal government with fingers in every pie, notice and comment rules are not necessarily the primary sources of costs of intervention. While the table covers the alleged costliest discrete rules of 21^st Century vintage, the administrative state has deep roots. No official regulatory assessments account for the 19th- and 20th-century progressive-era consolidations in finance, antitrust, infrastructure, and social custodial regulations, nor for the distortions caused by the rise of alphabet agencies—agencies whose few hundred reluctant self-assessments over the past 25 years are now somehow considered representative.

Today’s sprawling administrative state is fueled by congressional delegation—and, more troubling, by Congress’s disregard for enumerated powers. The mere existence of Mother-May-I bureaucracies turns everything, from local tap water to space commercialization, into a joint business-government venture, rather than a competitive free market. Federalism has largely collapsed, with states serving as satellite offices for federal ends rather than themselves acting as brakes on federal power.

In this context, Congress, the administration, and DOGE face a predicament where cutting rules alone isn’t enough. To truly drive change, entire regulatory agencies must be abolished, and the flawed rule-of-experts philosophy must be discarded. Only then can the U.S. revitalize itself as it enters its second 250 years. However, with just over a year to go, DOGE needs legislative support for its agenda. One promising option is the newly introduced bill called the SCRUB Act (Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome), which would codify DOGE, establish regulatory “Cut-Go” procedures, and make review and pruning a permanent fixture, not just an “America 250” campaign. Other options include requiring congressional approval of major or controversial rules, as the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act would establish.

The clock is ticking: DOGE has just over a year to complete its mission. Legislative reinforcement will be critical in ensuring that regulatory reform does not stall at the finish line.

For more see:

“The Federal Spending-Regulation Trap: Here’s An Escape Plan At Last,” Forbes.

“Trump’s 10-For-1 ‘Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation’ Executive Order: What’s Next?” Forbes