Donald Trump rips Competitive Enterprise Institute red tape report

The White House said Wednesday that President Trump is still exceeding his pledge to cut at least two regulations for every new one imposed, rejecting a think tank’s report that claimed the president fell behind the pace in fiscal 2019.

Senior administration officials said the administration issued 150 deregulatory actions in fiscal 2019 and issued 35 “significant” regulatory actions, for a regulation-cutting ratio of 4.3 to 1.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute said in its annual report on Wednesday that the administration’s ratio of cutting red tape was 1.7 to 1. The group compared only “significant” deregulatory actions to “significant” new regulations.

But White House officials said that’s not how the administration has kept score of its deregulation efforts, under an executive order signed by the president in 2017. The administration counts all deregulatory actions, whether they’re defined as “significant” or not.

“We define ’deregulatory’ as any burden reduction that we do,” a senior administration official said, adding that the standard has been consistent since the start of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

The author of the CEI report, Clyde Wayne Crews, said in response that “my calculation differs from the administration’s.”

“The bottom line is that within the confines of President Trump’s [executive order], the administration did even better than it claims, especially in the wake of its addressing the widespread abuse of guidance documents by regulatory agencies,” he said.

The president also directed Cabinet agencies in 2017 to reduce the overall cost of their regulations from year to year.

“President Trump has led the most productive and historic deregulation effort in modern history—removing government barriers that hinder both job creation and civil liberties,” said Chase Jennings, press secretary for the Office of Management and Budget. “The administration continues to accomplish our goal of removing two regulations for every new one created every year; agencies have vastly exceeded the goal by achieving a term-wide ratio of over 7 to 1, and a 2019 ratio of 4.3 to 1. The amount of regulatory burden being removed is at an all-time high.”

He said the administration’s proposed Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles rule alone “will save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars—the biggest deregulatory action of our lifetime.”

“And the president just issued a new Executive Order calling on agencies to deregulate even further to help reinvigorate the economy,” Mr. Jennings said. “Anyone suggesting that President Trump has slowed in his deregulation effort has been asleep at the wheel.”