President Trump charted a new course, prioritizing the removal of red tape and rolling back regulations through executive orders. Trump says red tape becomes “beautiful” when it is eliminated, and people who manage businesses certainly agree. U.S. firms don’t need to have the lightest burden; they only need one that’s competitive with the rest of the world. As former representative Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) told us, when Washington simply “stops the beatings,” growth happens on its own.6
Stephen Schwarzman is chairman and CEO of the investment firm Blackstone Group, which manages more than $500 billion of assets for institutions around the world. In 2017 he described the problem Trump was trying to solve as “a regulatory overload.” During an appearance on Mornings with Maria, Schwarzman said, “You know it was hard for the financial system to extend credit. It was hard for people to borrow.” Speaking of U.S. infrastructure projects, he said, “One of the biggest issues isn’t just the money. It’s the fact we seem to be able to approve almost nothing to get done.” Schwarzman added, “In the United States, it’s more than [red] tape… It’s Elmer’s Glue. You just can’t get stuff done. And in Canada and Germany, it takes two years to approve whole projects that take us 10 to 15 years.”7
By the end of 2017, eleven months after Trump took office, it was clear that he had driven a significant change during his rookie year as the nation’s chief executive. The number of those infamous pages in the Federal Register dropped by 35 percent in 2017, to the lowest level in more than twenty years. And the number of final rules described in those pages was the lowest since the 1970s. In the years ahead Trump’s government would continue to issue historically low levels of red tape.
Trump’s stats are even better than they appear, because many of the Trump rules repealed earlier rules, meaning they not only didn’t add new burdens but actually reduced federal red tape. The nonpolitician was proving to be the only recent president capable of taming the bureaucratic beast.
A 2017 editorial in the Wall Street Journal explained: “Ten days after his inauguration, Mr. Trump issued an executive order directing his departments to scour the books for rules they could rescind or repeal without damaging the law. He also directed that for each single regulation issued, agencies should identify at least two for elimination… through Sept. 30 the Trump Administration had taken 67 deregulatory actions but only three new significant regulatory actions. That’s a 22 to 1 ratio… since fall 2016 more than 1,500 planned regulatory actions have been withdrawn or delayed.”8
Nothing offends most of our colleagues in the press corps like limited government. But some media folks couldn’t decide whether to cast the Trump deregulatory effort as empty talk or a monumental threat to all they hold dear. According to a New York Times report: “ ‘We are just getting started,’ Mr. Trump said, speaking from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He described progress so far as the ‘most far-reaching regulatory reform’ in United States history, a claim he did not back up.”9
Bloomberg, too, cast doubt on whether the Trump campaign against red tape really amounted to much, and labeled the president’s comments on the subject “overblown claims of sweeping deregulation.” Bloomberg oddly argued that much of his success simply involved halting the implementation of Obama-era initiatives, which was perhaps a point in Trump’s favor.10
Meanwhile, over at the Daily Beast, there was talk of a “Trump revolution” leaving no part of the government untouched as it destroyed “critical regulations” protecting public health.11
NBC News for its part published a screed claiming that “American consumers took it on the chin in 2017” due to the Trump regulatory reform.12
But American consumers are also creators and earners, and they noticed that the American economy was accelerating.
Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan described the moment he realized his policy mixture of deregulation and tax cuts was increasing American prosperity. “I could tell our economic program was working when they stopped calling it Reaganomics,” he used to say with a chuckle.13
By this standard, Trumponomics was an immediate success. Not only did Democrats refuse to slap the Trump brand on the nation’s economy; one of them offered a competing claim of paternity. Newsweek reported in December 2017: “The American economy’s success comes down to environmental policies put in place during the Obama administration, said former President Barack Obama during a speech Tuesday as he jokingly thanked himself.”14
A week later a Washington Post “fact checker” opined that “Trump’s economy owes largely to trends started in the Obama era.”15
An Associated Press story was perhaps the most aggressive yet in lauding Obama for America’s rising prosperity in the period after he left office. “Trump Claims Credit For What Is Still Mostly Obama’s Economy,” argued the AP headline. Here’s how the news service made its case: “President Donald Trump relentlessly congratulates himself for the healthy state of the U.S. economy, with its steady growth, low unemployment, busier factories and confident consumers.
“But in the year since Trump’s inauguration, most analysts tend to agree on this: The economy remains essentially the same sturdy one he inherited from Barack Obama.
“Growth has picked up, but it’s not yet clear if it can sustain a faster expansion.”16
In fact, growth had picked up even a little bit more than Trump had predicted. During Obama’s final year in office in 2016, the U.S. economy expanded by 1.6 percent. After taking office in 2017, Trump issued his first federal budget proposal in May of that year. The Trump budget predicted that for the full calendar year 2017 the U.S. economy would post real growth—that is, after adjusting for inflation—of 2.3 percent. The actual number turned out to be 2.4 percent.
That 2017 Trump budget proposal also estimated that real growth in 2018 and 2019 would average
