Saturday, January 21, 2017

Understanding the Trump Order for an 'Immediate Regulatory Freeze'

President Donald Trump has ordered a freeze on all pending regulations until his administration can review them.

Trump fanboys are giddy. A comment here at EPJ:
Trump just issue [sic] an order for a regulatory freeze. Somehow you are going to spin this in a negative light. 
Actually, EPJ and Target Liberty are two of the very few places that do not spin things. We do not pretend that Donald Trump is a libertarian savior. We consider the actions taken relative to sound economic analysis and libertarian principles.

We expect Trump to make some sound moves freeing up parts of the economy and will say so. We expect him to be horrific in other areas and will say so.

As for the regulatory freeze, it is not a necessarily a positive. It is neutral and technical in nature.

Only two of Trump's cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate as of this morning, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Thus, it is wise for Trump to issue a freeze until his people are in place.

This in itself does not signal anything.

Politico explains:
Susan Dudley, a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, noted that such regulatory freezes by new presidencies are common. Obama had ordered a similar halt in January 2009 for pending regulations from the George W. Bush administration.

“Since outgoing presidents expect it, there probably aren’t a lot of major regulations it would apply to," said Dudley, who’s now director of the George Washington University Regulatory Study Center...

Anticipating a regulatory freeze, Obama took pains to finish as many regulations as possible long before he left office. But his agencies continued to pump out regulations late last year in hopes that they could take effect under Hillary Clinton. Even after Trump’s upset victory in November, some agencies were notably aggressive in pumping out regulations in the past few weeks, hoping they could slip through in the fog of the transition.
I have no doubt that one area where Trump will be good in is in the area of reducing regulations and we will report those reductions here but, at the same time, it is absurd to think Trump is anti-central planning.  His focus on regulation will be different from previous Administrations, not absent.

-RW

1 comment:

  1. Should we expect an immediate freeze of all foreign military operations to be issued later today?

    ReplyDelete