Insight
May 23, 2019
Administration Releases Spring 2019 Unified Agenda
On Wednesday, May 22, the Trump Administration released its latest edition of the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The report, generally released twice a year, provides an insight into which rules agencies hope to advance over the coming year. While this edition does not include the same in-depth coverage of regulatory budget goals under Executive Order (EO) 13,771 as recent fall editions have, it still helps to illustrate how the current administration has prioritized deregulatory action.
DEREGULATORY TREND CONTINUES
This edition of the Unified Agenda is now the fourth that includes data on which rulemakings are deemed as “deregulatory” under EO 13,771. As such, it is possible to begin examining trends over the past couple of years. The tables below show the edition-to-edition trends for active (those that agencies intend to act on within the next year or so) and completed (those that agencies have finalized since the preceding Unified Agenda) actions that carry the “deregulatory action” tag.
Both of these graphs demonstrate the steady growth in deregulatory activity under this administration. The number of regulatory proposals in the pipeline has increased by more than 100 since Fall 2017, and the number of those finalized in a given period has nearly doubled.
UPDATED REGULATORY PROJECTION
Last month, the American Action Forum examined where the administration stood in terms of its progress in the regulatory budgeting process under EO 13,771. Using the same methodology, the table below provides an updated outlook for fiscal year (FY) 2019.
| Regulatory Final Rules | Deregulatory Final Rules | Regulatory Costs ($billions) | Deregulatory Savings ($billions) | Net Totals ($billions) | |
| FY 2019 Through May 17 | 20 | 48 | $16.7 | -$9.3 | $7.4 |
| Rest of FY 2019 (Projected) | 13 | 16 | $7.8 | $-53.7 | -$45.9 |
| Potential Total | 33 | 64 | $24.5 | -$63 | -$38.5 |
Between several notable deregulatory actions becoming final in recent weeks and a handful of still-active “regulatory actions” proposed under the Obama Administration now falling outside of the FY 2019 window, the administration’s projected net savings total has increased by roughly $5 billion. While agencies currently stand at a cumulative net-cost balance, it appears that they will exceed the administration-wide goal of $18 billion in net savings by a sizable margin. The expected repeal of the “Clean Power Plan” (slated for next month) still drives most of this savings figure.
QUICK STATS
- Total Actions: 2,597
- EO 13,771 Deregulatory Actions: 555 (20 major rules)
- EO 13,771 Regulatory Actions: 197 (45 major rules)
- Economically Significant Actions: 124
- Actions Affecting Small Businesses: 178
