00:00Now we're going to talk about deregulation. It is, of course, one of President Trump's
00:03favorite words. We're ending high prices with tax cuts, deregulation, and frankly,
00:09again, the words common sense. My first four years, we did more deregulation than
00:15any other president in history. The single largest deregulatory action in American history.
00:24Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote an op-ed about it. President Trump has signed executive
00:29orders about it, and last spring, he told federal agencies to fast-track it without normal notice
00:35and public comment periods. So are they doing it? Bloomberg Law did an exclusive analysis and
00:40found the White House plan to cut through regulations has flopped. We asked Robert
00:45Iofola of Bloomberg Law why. The first Trump administration had some problems with this
00:50because federal law places a lot of requirements on what it takes to repeal a regulation. It's
00:57basically you have to go through a similar process as to create a regulation. So one of
01:04the shortcuts they were hoping to use was basically this exception to this law called the Administrative
01:12Procedure Act. And this is an exception that allows you to skip all of this burdensome rulemaking
01:19procedure. It's called the good cards exception. It's traditionally used in emergencies or to get
01:28rid of rules that are, you know, just ticky tacky and uncontroversial. So the administration came up with a
01:36plan to expand the use of this to say when an agency rules, deems that a rule is illegal, particularly
01:46illegal under
01:48one of a list of 10 Supreme Court cases, then they could go ahead and dispense with that sort of
01:54laborious
01:55multi-year rulemaking process and just go ahead and wipe it out directly.
02:00So that was the plan. And you had the administration kind of hammering that point home, directing
02:04agencies to do this. You have done an analysis of how much this has actually been put into effect. And
02:10what did you
02:10learn from from doing that analysis? Yeah, so I mean, when they rolled out this plan, this was early
02:16in 25. It was when Doge was running all over the place. It seemed like the administration could do just
02:23about anything, no matter what the law said. And when I spoke to people then, there was, you know, there
02:28was
02:30a wonder about how this would actually land. But after a year plus, since it was rolled out,
02:37what we found was that it was not widely adopted at all. You know, it was essentially a non-starter
02:46with
02:46agencies. There were just a handful of examples. They were primarily clustered around anti-DEI moves where
02:58agencies cited the Supreme Court ruling from a few years ago, in which the court basically got rid of the
03:07race-based affirmative action in universities and used that as a justification for getting rid of
03:15some small programs that would advantage, like minority-owned business and things like that. But
03:25the scale of the effort, you know, a year plus ago to what the actual results are, there's a rather
03:33wide
03:33delta there. And what does that tell you? Does it show that this wasn't effective, that there was
03:38concern about using this legal framework? What conclusions can we draw from how infrequently
03:43it has been used? Yeah, so the White House didn't talk to me about this, but in talking to former
03:50government regulators and administrative law experts, the consensus was that this is evidence that
03:59administration lawyers, or agency lawyers, I should say, you know, the general counsels at these
04:04different agencies sort of took a look at this and decided that it's not really tenable, that it's not
04:11the amount of litigation that they would face and the prospect of losing just didn't justify
04:18using this shortcut. I want to take a step back here, lastly, to go back to that idea that I
04:24brought up at the top,
04:25that it's kind of reforming the regulatory landscape. Are there places where they have been more
04:30successful? I look at these kind of committees and commissions. I look at the SEC. It's not fully
04:34staffed with commissioners. It seems like aside from rules, they have been able to make inroads here
04:39in neutering the sort of regulatory apparatus that the federal government has.
04:45100%. You know, if you're taking a step back and you're looking at what the Trump administration has
04:51done vis-a-vis the regulatory state, you're talking about, you know, radically shrinking
04:58regulatory agencies. You know, some agencies don't have enough regulators to sort of police their beat,
05:07so to speak. You have other instances, like with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where
05:12the agency, the administration tried to essentially eliminate the entire agency. When a court stopped
05:19them from doing that, they basically have sidelined the agency. They have repealed some rules going
05:24through the full process that are very meaningful. So it's not to say that the administration hasn't
05:32done things to impede the efforts of regulators to, again, police the beat, but just this specific
05:43initiative to quickly, you know, rip through the code of federal regulations with a good cause exception
05:50has kind of flopped. And one reason why that's important is because
05:57things like shifting enforcement priorities and shrinking agencies, those are very, very impactful,
06:05but those are a little bit easier to reverse by future administrations where this idea of
06:13repealing regulations, it's just, it's burdensome, it's costly, it takes a long time. So if you repeal a
06:19reg and a new administration comes in and wants to bring it back, they can't just snap their fingers
06:24and bring it back.
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