Trump Says ‘No President Has Ever Cut So Many Regulations.’ Not Quite.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump boasted again Friday that he has unleashed a roaring U.S. economy by cutting more red tape in the federal bureaucracy than any previous president, the latest attempt to prove he is making good on his campaign pledge to slash industry regulations.

“No president has ever cut so many regulations in their entire term, OK, as we have cut in less than a year,” Trump told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “And it is my opinion that the regulations had as big an impact as these massive tax cuts that we have given.”

Before taking office, Trump promised to eliminate at least two federal regulations for each new one that is issued during his administration. In dozens of speeches since, the president largely has stuck to two specific claims about his deregulation record.

Neither is true, according to analysts who study regulations and former federal workers who have administered them.

The Trump administration has engaged in a sleight of hand to create the 22-1 ratio. And while Trump has made progress in his deregulatory agenda, his claims of achieving more success in one year than throughout the entire presidencies of any of his predecessors is hyperbole, not fact.

Trump demanded the “2-for-1 rule” in one of his first executive orders. He claims that it has been so successful that the federal government has actually eliminated 22 regulations for every one enacted.

A White House fact sheet from December declared that the Trump administration had “issued 67 deregulatory actions while imposing only three new regulatory actions.” To back up its claim, the fact sheet cited a chart published by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs that described each of the actions.

But the chart — which the federal Regulatory Information Service Center says has never been compiled during earlier presidencies — raises more questions than it answers. For example:

— A database that is maintained by the White House regulatory affairs office outlines 34 “deregulatory” actions, compared with 67 in the chart. The White House did not respond to repeated inquiries to explain the discrepancy.

— Some items labeled “deregulatory action” clearly involve some regulation as well. For instance, one “deregulatory action” lifts a ban on imports of pitahaya, or dragon fruit, from Ecuador. But it also subjects the imports to new inspections requirements. Other actions are temporary, like the dismissal of a century-old shipping law to help hurricane aid efforts in Puerto Rico. Doing so was labeled a “deregulatory action,” although it only lasted 10 days and Trump declined to fully or permanently renew it.

— Not all actions are created equal. Three actions designated as “regulatory” were described as economically significant — meaning that they have an impact of $100 million or more. Only two “deregulatory” actions were considered economically significant.

— Of the 65 other “deregulatory actions” on the chart, 60 percent were either routine, administrative or otherwise not significant. About one-third of those efforts to roll back regulations began under President Barack Obama. And 10 do not appear to be rules — they are advisory notices or guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget.

“The 22-1 ratio needs to be taken with a grain of salt,” said Susan Dudley, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President George W. Bush.

In October, Trump boasted that under his administration, “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.”

Trump later compared the deregulatory actions in his first year in office to all of those taken during the full “four years, eight years, or, in one instance, 16 years” in all previous presidential administrations.

No American president has served for 16 years; Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to four presidential terms but served only 12 years before dying in office.

Beyond that, comparing regulatory activity across administrations is an imperfect exercise. Standards for making and revoking rules are frequently changing, and courts and Congress can tweak and review them as well. But available metrics indicate that Trump is wrong to claim he has stopped or eliminated more federal rules than any other president.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs says it withdrew 635 rules in 2017 — a fast pace over a one-year period by any measure. But that is not more than any previous presidency — Obama withdrew 1,814 federal rules during his eight-year term and Bush eliminated 2,813 while in office. The Program for Economic Research on Regulation, at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, combs the Federal Register to quantify the number of rule-making actions by regulatory agencies. University researchers found that federal regulations actually grew about 0.65 percent during Trump’s first year in office. They also noted that the rate of growth was slower than what it was annually from 1970 to 2016, when it averaged about 2.1 percent.

Experts said Trump’s efforts to cut through the bureaucracy fall far short of the structural changes made under Ronald Reagan, who abolished entire regulatory agencies and eliminated some economic regulations in the transportation, telecommunications and energy industries. “Nothing Trump has done to date compares to that in terms of impact on Americans,” Dudley said.

Cary Coglianese, director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that “a lot of the key institutions’ processes that we have today, dealing with regulation, were established by Reagan.” He pointed to the 1981 enactment of cost-benefit analyses and legal challenges to Reagan’s deregulation policies that set current standards for administrative law, which govern how federal, state and local agencies operate.

Trump’s hyperbole not withstanding, he can claim some deregulatory successes.

Previous reports in The New York Times have detailed the Trump administration’s lax enforcement of certain rules across several agencies. Early in his administration, Trump rolled back Obama-era rules though an unprecedented use of the 1996 Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to “disapprove” regulations issued within 90 days with the help of the president.

Dan Goldbeck of the American Action Forum, a nonprofit conservative group that promotes smaller government, said he sees a more concerted effort to streamline and trim back regulations under Trump than under many previous administrations.

The federal regulatory system will continue to evolve throughout — and beyond — Trump’s time in office. So will his own approach, experts said.

So far in the 2018 fiscal year, the administration has shifted its deregulation efforts toward making substantive changes through the regular rule-making process, Goldbeck said. As evidence, he pointed to a new rule to amend the federal meat inspection process that the Department of Agriculture estimates could save millions of dollars annually, according to a department estimate. “But expect to see a delay” in how much fruit these efforts will bear Goldbeck said. “That’s just nature of the process.”

And Trump has reversed at least one of his own decisions, backtracking on his waiver to regulate state government drug-testing rules.

Additionally, there is no guarantee that regulations that have been waived will survive legal challenges, nor that they will remain in place in future presidential administrations. Once agencies complete the rule-making process, Dudley said, “they will likely have to defend their deregulatory action in court, where they may or may not succeed.” Congress also could later decide to reverse Trump’s actions.

“Regulatory change is not forever. They’re not like diamonds,” Mr. Coglianese said.