President Trump is crushing President Reagan's record on deregulation

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In a speech on October 11 promoting his tax-reform plan, Donald Trump spoke rosily of America’s economic revival, crediting himself for having cleared the way for growth. “Since January of this year, we have slashed job-killing red tape all across our economy,” the president said. “We have stopped or eliminated more regulations in the last eight months than any president has done during an entire term. It’s not even close.”

It seemed a characteristic bit of Trumpian magniloquence—he’s not only a boffo deregulator, he’s the best ever! Still, it was a remarkable claim. Trump has overseen more deregulation than George W. Bush or Ronald “government is the problem” Reagan?

But, measured by at least one significant standard, Trump’s claim is true. Patrick McLaughlin of the Mercatus Center, a free-market-oriented think tank at George Mason University, applies innovative research techniques to the study of regulation and the economy. He recently analyzed the output of regulatory restrictions promulgated in the last several presidencies, going back to Jimmy Carter. McLaughlin found that there have been periods in some presidencies when regulatory output slowed or declined—in several years of the Reagan presidency, for instance, and in 1996, when “reinventing government” was part of Bill Clinton’s election pitch. But over the full terms of each recent president, including Reagan, regulation increased, according to McLaughlin. So far the increase in regulatory restrictions under Trump has been near to zero.

“So in that sense, the president may be right,” the economist reports. “There may not be a net increase in regulations so far under him, and since there was a net increase in every four-year term for every preceding president, going back to the ’70s, then I think that could be a safe statement.”

It’s a reminder that in this distraction-a-minute presidency, it can be useful to distinguish between the person of the president, who has no discernible ideology, and his presidency, which, so far, has been strikingly conservative.

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The immediate plan was to employ a powerful but rarely successful legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act. A product of the 1996 Gingrich revolution, the act empowers Congress to override any regulation within 60 days of its promulgation. Each review roughly resembles regular legislation; it can’t be filibustered, but it is subject to presidential veto, which is largely why the act has been successfully deployed only one time, early in the first term of George W. Bush.

President Trump has signed 14 such actions in 2017.

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Trump critics on the right may not be ready to declare Trump the avatar of modern conservatism, but, despite expectations and beneath the rhetorical dust storms he perpetuates, his actual governance has been strikingly conservative. It’s only been nine months, and Trump may never be able to distinguish the Sharon Statement from Sharon Osbourne. But if the trend continues, Trump will doubtless find occasion to declare himself more Reaganesque than the Gipper.

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