TRUMP BID TO CUT REGULATIONS COST US $15B IN RED TAPE

President Trump has long made cutting regulations a signature talking point.

In 2017, he even held an event at the White House where he cut a literal red tape before the cameras, but everything went for naught as the cost of regulations actually rose in three of Trump’s four years in the White House.

Earlier this year, he bragged his administration had “ended this regulatory assault on the American worker.”

However, Ben Werschkul reported for Yahoo Finance that new data from a center-right think tank American Action Forum showed new regulations costing $14.7 billion were added in 2020 alone.

Another way to measure it: 290 million “paperwork hours” were added on the to-do lists of workers in government and the private sector last year.

The data were compiled by bringing together each of the relevant government agency’s own estimate of the impact of any given regulation. “Predominantly, what they're calculating is the estimate of economic impact on the private sector,” says Dan Bosch, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, and one of the report authors.

“So, most of the costs, but I can't say all, are expected to be borne by the private sector,” Bosch says. From 2017 to 2020, the data show, Washington finalized 1,336 regulations across a range of government agencies with a total cost of $64.7 billion and almost 330 million paperwork hours.

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