Trump Regulatory Agenda Swings the Pendulum Against Crucial Protections

To say that the policy priorities of the Trump administration represent a U-turn from the Biden administration is a severe understatement. The recent release of the long-awaited Spring 2025 Regulatory Agenda — the first of the current Trump administration — provides us with our first concrete picture of just how far the regulatory policy pendulum is going to swing. From climate and energy to public health, the current administration is systematically undermining important advancements achieved during the previous cycle.

Pursuant to the Regulatory Flexibility Act (with additional requirements spelled out in Executive Order 12866), presidential administrations must assemble the Regulatory Agenda twice a year, in the fall and spring. This report spells out all of the planned regulatory actions the administration is planning to take in the next year or so, broken down by agency, and includes basic information on each of those actions — such as a description of the action, certain anticipated impacts, and the statutory authority for them. These items are included in the “active” agenda. But agencies will also list actions in their “long-term” agenda (i.e., those for which they don’t expect to make any progress in the next year), as well as the “inactive” list (i.e., actions that the administration doesn’t plan to pursue but doesn’t abandon either).

It can be helpful to think of the Regulatory Agenda as a collection of snapshots documenting the status of these actions as they move through the rulemaking pipeline. As such, it also provides a way of measuring continuity — or discontinuity — in regulatory priorities over time. As the first Regulatory Agenda of the current Trump administration, the Spring 2025 agenda reveals the extent and aggressiveness of the administration’s promise to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state."

In this short blog post, we will follow a two-pronged strategy. This first step is to understand how much of this agenda is completely new. An easy way of doing this is by mining the Regulation Identifier Number (RIN) status for each rule, which states if the rule has already been included in the regulatory agenda in the past, and compare this cycle to the first Regulatory Agenda of the Biden administration.

In the Spring of 2021, 23.9 percent of the rules (609 out of 2,546) appeared in the Regulatory Agenda for the first time. By contrast, 41.3 percent of the rules in the Trump administration’s agenda (868 out of 2,102) have never appeared in the Regulatory Agenda. This marks a notable departure with the previous administration.

Incidentally, this represents a contrast with Trump’s first term as well, in which 32.7 percent of the rules were new. Importantly, more than half of these (484) are deregulatory actions. Deregulatory actions also represent the largest category of actions in the Spring 2025 agenda. It is clear that this term is qualitatively different from what came before.

The second step is to understand how the current administration is treating the legacy regulatory actions that were left over from the end of the Biden administration. To do this, we compared the RINs from the Fall 2024 Unified Agenda to those for the regulatory actions included in the Spring 2025 Agenda. This allowed us to track and identify the patterns of changes in regulatory status — such as how many rules from the active agenda have been relegated to the long-term or inactive lists (or withdrawn altogether).

The diagram below shows these “flows,” capturing all regulations that were part of the Fall 2024 agenda and their status in the current regulatory agenda. Note that these are all legacy actions from the Fall 2024 agenda, so the diagram does not capture regulations that appeared in the Spring 2025 agenda for the first time.

We included every active, long-term, and inactive rule in our analysis. For ease of interpretation, we’ve only highlighted changes in status that are relevant for our analysis. Rules that have not changed status, or that have changed in a predictable way (such as from ‘Final Rule Stage’ to ‘Completed Actions’) are not highlighted.

Our initial expectation was that the Trump administration would swiftly move to kill many Biden-era regulations they disagreed with (i.e., discontinue them by formally eliminating their RINs). This turned out to be the case with 402 rules denoted as “withdrawn,” which are included in the “completed actions” list.

For other Biden-era rulemakings, the Trump administration simply downgraded their regulatory status. This less drastic step allows the administration to stall work on or otherwise bury substantial parts of Biden’s legacy regulatory agenda without taking the formal step of terminating them. For example, 222 rules that were in the “Proposed Rule Stage” in the Fall of 2024 have now been placed under “Long-Term Actions.” Similarly, 113 rules that were in the “Final Rule Stage” are now listed as “Long-Term Actions.” Additionally, there were 49 rules in the final stage, 79 long-term actions, and 111 proposed rules that are now deemed “Inactive.”

Put differently, many of the rules that remain in the regulatory pipeline from the Biden administration are moving “backwards.” In contrast, the diagram above shows how relatively few of them remain stuck in place (e.g., categorized as proposed rule stage in both agendas), and few are still progressing through the pipeline (e.g., moving up from proposed rule stage to final rule stage). All of these trends tend to paint a picture of how the regulatory agenda is moving in a completely different direction as a result of the transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration.

Of course, some adjustments in regulatory status can be expected even within a given presidential administration. Changes in priorities, unexpected legal developments, or new resource constraints can force agencies to rethink the actions contained in their regulatory agendas. The extent of these patterns, however, is significant.

Such regulatory policy pendulum swings provide a powerful demonstration of the growth of presidential management of the administrative state, as well as the extent to which regulations across substantive policy areas have become so politically polarized. We often hear that the business community abhors such swings as they undermine long-term investment planning. Indeed, one of the major justifications for ending Chevron deference is that it would constrain such pendulum swings. As this is the first presidential transition post-Loper Bright, it appears that this argument was misplaced.