REGULATIONS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “As the Trump administration nears its one-year mark, White House officials are touting cuts to regulations as one of their top achievements. ‘In the history of our country, no president, during their entire term, has cut more regulations than we’ve cut,’ President Donald Trump said last month. His Press Secretary Sarah Sanders puts the total at nearly 1,000, an astounding accomplishment for the notoriously slow-moving federal bureaucracy. But government records—and in some cases the agencies carrying out Trump’s policies—tell a very different story. For one thing, only a handful of regulations have actually been taken off the books. That’s due to laws that keep government policies from wildly swinging back and forth every time moving trucks show up at the White House…. Hundreds of the pending regulations had been effectively shelved before Trump took office. Others listed as withdrawn are actually still being developed by federal agencies. Still more were moot because the actions sought in a pending rule were already in effect.”
–Alan Levin and Jesse Hamilton, “Trump Takes Credit for Killing Hundreds of Regulations That Were Already Dead,” Bloomberg, Mar. 27, 2018 1:00am