According to a new analysis, the Trump administration significantly cut the pace of federal rulemaking in 2025, a first step toward limiting the unconstitutional reach of the federal government.
Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports:
While Biden’s 2024 Federal Register totaled 106,109 pages — the highest in history — the 2025 volume closed the year with “only” 61,461 pages (adjusted for blanks and skips), the lowest seen since Trump’s first-term tally of 61,067. Both are levels otherwise not seen since 1993. Notably, 7,648 of those pages are attributable to Biden-era activity before Trump’s inauguration.
Commenting on Crews’ report, J.D. Tuccille of Reason emphasizes the significance of this statistic:
True, the Federal Register is only a rough count of regulatory activity; there are other ways the government imposes red tape on the population. Also, the Administrative Procedure Act requires that a rule be issued to repeal a preexisting rule. Theoretically, you could fatten up the Federal Register with nothing but rule rescissions. But the page count is a good starting point for judging the general direction of regulatory activity.
On that point, Trump offers a real contrast to both his predecessor and his successor in the White House. Prior to the Biden administration, BallotPedia reports, “the Federal Register hit an all-time high of 95,894 pages in 2016” under the presidency of Barack Obama (the Law Librarians Society of Washington D.C. puts it at 97,110 pages). That was the first time it exceeded 90,000 pages. The Biden administration broke a new barrier when it exceeded 100,000 pages in 2024. Of course, the rules those pages represent, offset by whatever “unrules” (delays and rescission[s]) are mixed in, accumulate year after year.
Although the number of Federal Register pages is revealing, it does not necessarily give the full picture. Crews provides some additional statistics that better reveal the extent of the Trump administration’s deregulatory activity:
Final rule counts cratered to 2,441 in 2025. That is not only substantially down from Biden’s 3,248 in 2024, it is the lowest total since recordkeeping began in the mid-1970s. Trump bested his own first-term low-water mark of 2,964 rules in 2019.
Moreover, Trump’s “net” total is considerably lower still, as 243 of 2025’s rules are attributable to Biden, and a substantial share of Trump’s own issuances consist of “Unrules” in the form of delays and rescissions….
Of the rules finalized in 2025, 155 were deemed “significant” by agencies or the Office of Management and Budget, with “Unrules” included among them. This shift is reflected in the administration’s recent claims to have finalized 646 deregulatory actions while adding only five significant ones, for a ratio of 129 rules out for every rule added.
Of 2025’s 2,441 rules, 597 are acknowledged to affect small businesses, compared with 770 in 2024 — again with delays and rollbacks prominent. Thirty small-business rules are classified as significant….
Meanwhile, federal agencies proposed 1,498 new rules, compared with more than 2,000 during each Obama year. Proposed rules under Trump tend not to be major new regulatory initiatives but repeals, notably of environmental and energy rules.
As an example of these regulatory rollbacks, the White House on Wednesday announced that the Council on Environmental Quality issued a rule to repeal draconian federal permitting regulations dating back to the 1970s.
Will Congress Follow Through?
Although Crews applauds the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in federal rulemaking and rescind existing regulations, he warns, “The real test ahead is whether deregulation will be made durable by Congress or be left to the whims of the executive officeholder.”
This point is important. If Congress does not act, a subsequent president could completely reverse the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions. Accordingly, Congress must enact legislation that ensures deregulation continues — and accelerates.
A good place for Congress to start is to repeal the Administrative Procedure Act, a 1946 law that entrenched the unconstitutional federal administrative state and enabled its further expansion. As James Madison affirmed in The Federalist, No. 45, the federal government’s powers under the U.S. Constitution are “few and defined.” Under the modern administrative state, however, the federal government has enormously exceeded those limitations. Contact your U.S. representative and senators, and urge them to introduce and enact strong legislation to completely abolish the administrative state. Additionally, contact your state legislators, and urge them to abolish their state-level equivalents and restore constitutional state government.
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