On January 31, 2025, President Trump signed the “Unleashing Prosperity through Deregulation” executive order. The order states its intent is to “promote prudent financial management and alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens” and directs agencies, when proposing a new regulation, to “identify at least 10 existing regulations to be repealed,” unless prohibited by law. The order also directs agency heads to “ensure that the total incremental cost of all new regulations […] shall be significantly less than zero” and that the cost of new regulations be offset by regulatory rollbacks. The order states that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director will provide guidance on implementation of the order’s directives, including the 10 for 1 regulatory repeal.
The executive order also directs the OMB director to revoke the revised Circular A-4, which guides how agencies analyze their regulatory proposals, including through cost-benefit analysis. The Biden Administration updated the guidance in 2023 to ensure that agencies conduct “high-quality and evidence-based” analysis that reflects current science, economic data, and analytical advances and accuarately quantifies the impacts, including costs and benefits, of significant regulations. The 2023 revised Circular A-4 was subject to interagency review, public comment, and peer review.
Under the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act, enacted by Congress in 2000, OMB guidance to agencies on benefit-cost analyses must follow specific steps, including a peer review process. As OMB looks to revoke the 2023 guidance, it will be important to watch what steps are taken and the justification and peer review process of reverting to the 2003 guidance.
Reverting to outdated guidance and the 10-for-1 deregulatory approach will hamper agencies’ ability to conduct robust, data-driven regulatory analysis using up-to-date data and analytical methods. During the first Trump administration, OMB implemented a 2-for-1 approach which, as Jody Freeman explained in 2017, is “arbitrary, not implementable, and a terrible idea” that will intentionally “strangle even the most beneficial rules under the guise of cutting red tape.” A 10-to-1 rollback is even worse. As Freeman explains, most public health and environmental rules have costs, but those are generally vastly outweighed by considerable societal benefits of health-protective rules. These directives disregard the vast benefits of many regulations and are, as Freeman notes, “contrary to the public interest.”
The Biden-era Circular A-4 enabled agencies to use the most up-to-date data and methods to accurately estimate the cost and benefits of rules protecting public health and safety. These Trump directives to ignore science in decision-making are likely to face legal challenges.