Do You Like Radiation? How About Coal? Well You are Going to Get Plenty of Both Without Pesty Regulations

A coal-fueled power plant in Monroe, Mich. Mr. Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency are identifying rules that impeded energy production.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

By Coral Davenport

The New York Times

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump administration officials want to reverse a regulation that has required nursing homes to have more medical staff on duty.

At the Mine Safety and Health Administration, powerful lobbying groups have asked the administration to eliminate a rule to protect miners from inhaling the dust of crystalline silica, a mineral that is used in concrete, smartphones and cat litter but that can be lethal in the lungs.

And at the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radio and television broadcasting and satellite communications, President Trump’s appointees published a seemingly exuberant notice asking for suggestions on which rules to get rid of, titled “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.”

Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale. 

Usually, the legal process of repealing federal regulations takes years — and rules erased by one administration can be restored by another. But after chafing at that system during his first term and watching President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enact scores of new rules pushed by the left, Mr. Trump has marshaled a strategy for a dramatic do-over designed to kill regulations swiftly and permanently.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, agency officials are compiling the regulations they have tagged for the ash heap, racing to meet a deadline next week after which the White House will build its master list to guide what the president called the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

The approach, overseen by Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, rests on a set of novel legal strategies in which the administration intends to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations that have historically taken years to undo, according to people familiar with the plans. The White House theory relies on Supreme Court decisions — some recent and at least one from the 1980s — that they believe give them the basis for sweeping change.

The broad scope of the effort has created a major opportunity for businesses and their allies, who have long lobbied Washington to soften regulations and now have willing and even eager partners spread across the administration — including many agency appointees with close ties to industries — to help rewrite the rules they live by. 

A sign of Mr. Trump’s aggressiveness came last week, when the White House directed agencies to bypass a lengthy legal requirement that proposed changes to rules be posted for public comment. Instead, the memo said, regulators should in many cases just move to immediately cancel the rules.

ImageRussel T. Vought, wearing a blue suit and dark tie, seated at a long wooden table in front of other people in rows of chairs in a wood-paneled room.

Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is the mastermind of the deregulation effort.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Donald Kenkel, a professor of economics at Cornell University who served as the chief economist to the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration.

“It’s going on much more quietly than some of the other fireworks we’re seeing, but it will have great impact,” Mr. Kenkel said.

Once Mr. Trump’s orders to repeal or stop enforcement of rules are in effect, Mr. Kenkel said, “the effects of deregulation will be more or less immediate.”

Administration officials say they have a greater understanding now than they did during the first term of their powers to transform the regulatory system. 

“We had four years in which to prepare, and a first term of trial and error, and now we know exactly how the operation works,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “We have a lot of latitude here and we have the ability to roll back some of these devastating regulations.”

This account inside the Trump administration’s sprawling campaign to undo generations of regulations is based on interviews with 14 current and former Trump administration officials, federal regulators and people involved in the DOGE mission.

Mr. Trump and his allies see the new steps as the coup de grâce in a systematic overhaul of the federal government that began with mass layoffs and efforts to shut down some agencies. They believe that the rapid repeal of some rules — and the stop-work order on enforcing others — will quickly and permanently uproot a vast network of regulations that many see as a safety net, but that they view as a drag on industry and a tool for what Mr. Vought has called a “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy.

Image

President Trump, wearing a blue suit and red tie, signs a paper.

President Trump direct each agency to submit lists of regulations that could be cut.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

While Republican presidents have for generations sought to rein in regulations, experts say there has never been such an immediate and comprehensive strategy to so quickly erase or freeze this many rules that are woven throughout so many dimensions of the American economy and daily life. 

“Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent and stable enforcement of regulations, and if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,” said Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation. “This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace.”

Others say a wholesale review of federal rules will weed out those that slow down the government and the economy. For example, there are still dozens of regulations that require reporting information by outdated methods like telegram and cable.

“It’s like sedimentary rock that’s been building up for hundreds of years,” said Kent Lassman, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington with close ties to the administration.

The need for speed

The roots of Mr. Trump’s full-throttle approach this year can be traced to the early months of his first term, when he started trying to rip up President Barack Obama’s largest climate change regulation, a rule to cut planet-warming tailpipe pollution by forcing automakers to sell more electric vehicles.

 

That rule, along with many more of his first-term regulatory rollbacks, was soon restored by the Biden administration — a fact that further infuriated Mr. Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

 

For his second term, Mr. Trump wanted deregulation to happen fast, in order to see the impacts and bask in the credit while he was still in the White House, according to the person familiar with the matter — and he wanted the rollbacks to be permanent.

The specifics of the new approach coalesced in the days after the election, when Mr. Musk teamed with Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump ally who co-founded the Department of Government Efficiency. As Mr. Musk pushed the DOGE team to quickly fire workers and eliminate government offices, Mr. Ramaswamy mapped out a more detailed plan to use a pair of recent Supreme Court rulings to seek out old regulations that, under the new decisions, could now be legally vulnerable.

One of those rulings, in 2022, limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. The other, in 2024, ended a precedent known as Chevron deference in which federal agencies were given wide legal latitude to interpret laws. 

Together, the Supreme Court’s actions served to limit the broad regulatory authority of federal agencies, and Mr. Ramaswamy asserted that they could justify permanently erasing many rules that had been granted before those precedents.

The mission has gained steam since the inauguration under the direction of Mr. Vought, who took over the planning after Mr. Ramaswamy left the Department of Government Efficiency to run for Ohio governor.

Mr. Trump ordered agency heads in February to work with DOGE teams to identify rules that impede technological innovation, energy production, and private enterprise and entrepreneurship, among other issues, giving them a 60-day window to prepare their target lists.

 

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, developed an artificial intelligence tool intended to comb through the 100,000-plus pages of the Code of Federal Regulations and identify rules that are outdated or legally vulnerable in the wake of the two Supreme Court decisions, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is not yet clear whether the tool has succeeded in its assignment, one of the people said. 

White House officials did not respond to emails requesting comment from Mr. Musk on the matter.

Mr. Vought is seeking public input. He posted a call for ideas on the Federal Register, the government portal where the public can comment on proposed regulatory changes, adding a deregulatory “suggestion box.”

Repeal and ignore

In recent days, Mr. Trump’s executive orders have signaled an even more aggressive approach than many expected.

The White House directive last week that many rules can simply be repealed without a “notice and comment” period would circumvent a process long required by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act — and would probably trigger court challenges, legal experts said.

“There may well be many regulations they can revise or revoke in light of these recent Supreme Court decisions, but there are going to be very few they can simply revoke with a brief statement, as the president’s order suggested,” said Susan E. Dudley, who served as the top regulatory official in the George W. Bush administration.

That is why the White House is planning another startling approach to regulations that it may not be able to immediately repeal. For those, according to people familiar with the discussions, it will simply stop enforcing the rules while going through the legal notice-and-comment process to roll them back — effectively ignoring them until they are off the books.  

That strategy relies on an obscure 1985 Supreme Court decision, Heckler v. Chaney, in which Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that if a federal agency did not enforce a regulatory action, that act was generally beyond the review of the courts.

Experts said that precedent could give the Trump administration grounds to stop enforcing the rules.

“That puts them in a very strong posture,” said Lisa Heinzerling, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University who served in the E.P.A. during the Obama administration. “People have taken advantage of Heckler v. Chaney before but not in this across-the-board fashion.”

The impact of that, she said, “will be huge.”