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During the night of April 9, President Donald Trump continued his administration’s radical assault on our nation’s critical system of regulatory safeguards with three new executive orders and a separate memorandum. These actions build on several previous ones that target regulatory safeguards, and they traffic in a lot of the same false rhetoric about the essential role our regulatory system plays in our society. But what makes these actions different is the manner in which they trample on administrative law and the procedural protections that it is meant to uphold.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the questionable leadership of Elon Musk, has quickly become the signature initiative of the second Trump administration. Since Inauguration Day, personnel associated with DOGE have fanned out to virtually every executive branch agency, systematically dismantling them from within by hacking their IT infrastructure, firing thousands of staff, and even attempting to shut down entire agencies. To help congressional leaders, concerned policymakers, and citizens understand the various ways that DOGE’s actions may be unlawful, the Center has established the Unmasking DOGE tool that catalogues the numerous legal infirmities that underlie both DOGE as an institution and the specific actions it is seeking to carry out.

On February 25, we launched the Center for Progressive Reform’s CRA By the Numbers 2025 tracker. With this tool, we will monitor every Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution and document the threats they pose to our public protections, as well as the benefits that would be lost if they pass. The data presented in the tracker will shine a light on the harm that abusive use of the CRA causes to the public, and why, ultimately, the CRA should be repealed.

I could tell you what Trump’s latest executive order on “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative” says. I could tell you that it purports to give the illegally constituted “DOGE Team Leads” assigned to every agency nearly unchecked authority to choose which of the agencies’ existing rules get to remain on the book and whether and what kind of the regulations the agency may issue in the future. I could also tell you that it is now official Trump administration policy that existing regulations that are too inconvenient for the business community – no matter what kind of benefits they deliver – will no longer be enforced, purportedly rendering them a dead letter. I could tell you all these things, but they wouldn’t convey what the import of what this order actually means.

On February 18, President Donald Trump issued another seemingly technocratic executive order regarding the structure of our government. This one purportedly asserts presidential control over so-called independent regulatory agencies — or administrative offices that Congress has intentionally designed to be insulated against direct day-to-day control from the president.

On February 6, the U.S. Senate confirmed Russell Vought as the next director of the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has been at the epicenter of the Trump administration’s push to remake the federal government in an authoritarian image.

Over the course of two posts, I have explored in detail my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order last Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. Remarkably, the order is still not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I offer my final set of observations on what the order is likely to mean during the second Trump administration.

In my previous post, I began exploring some of my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. At this point, the order is not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I will offer some additional observations and analysis.

Late Friday night, while news about Elon Musk’s apparent unconstitutional purge of the Office Personnel Management was beginning to trickle out, President Trump quietly announced his promised executive order calling on agencies to eliminate 10 existing “rules” for every new rule they want to institute.