Behind the $211.8 Billion: Evaluating EO 14192’s Deregulatory Accounting

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Early in his second term, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” requiring agencies to remove ten regulations for every new one issued. EO 14192 further required that the total incremental cost of all new regulations “shall be significantly less than zero.”

Last December, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) released a report card on how agencies performed under EO 14192; unsurprisingly, the administration gave itself an A-plus. Far from merely meeting the president’s 10:1 goal, OIRA reports that agencies issued 129 deregulatory actions for every new regulation in the first eight months of the administration, resulting in about $211.8 billion in cost savings.

These are impressive-sounding figures. Yet there is far less to OIRA’s reported results than meets the eye. While there has been a deregulation of sorts, it has come primarily in the form of reduced regulatory output. True deregulation remains elusive.

Two Ratios, One Headline

As with President Trump’s first term requirement to eliminate two rules for every new one issued, agencies count a range of regulatory actions in the numerator, but only significant regulatory actions in the denominator. Thus, the 129:1 headline ratio covers all 646 deregulatory actions, but only significant regulatory actions. Simply put, OIRA gamed its methodology to produce a higher ratio.

Of these deregulatory actions, 428 are guidance documents, policy letters, and internal agency materials, rather than revisions to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). EO 14192’s broad definition of “regulation” deliberately includes these sorts of “sub-regulatory” directives, and there is a legitimate policy case for counting them, as they can impose real compliance burdens on businesses and individuals even when they never go through a notice-and-comment rulemaking process. However, reversing sub-regulatory documents is much easier than substantive deregulation, and, more importantly, this sort of flip-flopping is utterly unexceptional in today’s federal government. Whenever there’s a party changeover in the White House, incoming administrations immediately reverse the outgoing administration’s sub-regulatory output. It’s the low-hanging fruit that every administration plucks.

According to the OIRA report, only 218 actions (of the 646 deregulatory actions) actually refine the CFR. That’s a 43:1 ratio. While that, too, is an impressive-sounding ratio, it’s also an overstatement. Most of these deregulatory actions pertained to programs that were already obsolete; rather than true deregulation, these measures simply scrubbed dead text from the CFR. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, took credit for cutting several tobacco rules, even though those programs had been ended by Congress more than 20 years ago. Almost all the Federal Communications Commission’s actions were like this. To be sure, agencies should be commended for pruning out-of-date rules from the CFR; however, this sort of housekeeping doesn’t jibe with the current administration’s deregulatory framing for EO 14192.

Dissecting the $211.8 Billion

The ten-for-one requirement is one element of the EO’s mandate. The other asks agencies to ensure that the total incremental cost of all new regulations “shall be significantly less than zero,” a standard that the EO leaves to the OMB Director’s discretion. Again, the top line results ($212 billion in savings!) don’t hold up to scrutiny.

The Department of the Treasury alone accounts for $128.6 billion, 61% of the government-wide total, even though none of its 118 actions were rulemakings. The Treasury’s completed actions list contains mainly IRS notices and declarations that former revenue rulings are obsolete. The IRS’s Notice 2025-36 explains that these documents were selected for obsolescence precisely because they “no longer provide useful information,” and many reference statutory provisions that Congress repealed years or decades earlier. For example,  guidance on collapsible corporations addresses a provision permanently repealed by Congress in 2013, and the Section 2011 estate tax credit guidance references a credit, repealed in 2014. EO 14192 did not make these instruments obsolete. It merely prompted the IRS to formally acknowledge what was already true, which raises the question: if no taxpayer or business was relying on or spending money to comply with guidance that referenced a law repealed a decade ago, how does its official obsolescence eliminate such large burdens?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims $47.7 billion across 32 deregulatory actions. The difficulty lies in two of those actions: the formal rescissions of both the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) and its associated compliance portal, the Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT). Congress allowed CFATS's statutory authority to expire in July 2023, nearly two years before the FY2025 accounting period, and CSAT, which existed solely to support CFATS compliance submissions, had no remaining function once CFATS lapsed. Formally rescinding both raises the same analytical question as the Treasury actions: what ongoing compliance burden was actually being eliminated?

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) claims $19.3 billion across 40 deregulatory actions, and the concern here is categorically different from Treasury and DHS. HHS is not rescinding already-lapsed instruments; its actions involve active programs with real compliance implications. The clearest example is the Contract Year 2026 Medicare Advantage and Part D rule, an annual payment update issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) each year, independent of any deregulatory directive. Counting a recurring, legally required annual payment adjustment as a voluntary, deregulatory cost-saving blurs the distinction between genuine regulatory rollback and routine administrative operations. HHS is also the only one of the top three agencies to report regulatory actions that increase regulatory costs (two actions), suggesting that the net savings figure reflects internal trade-offs that the summary table does not make visible.

Slowed Pace of Regulation

These results are broadly consistent with what the accounting structure would predict — the asymmetric counting rules made a ratio well above ten-to-one a likely outcome. The more substantive question is whether the slowdown in regulatory output reflects a real reduction in burden. On that measure, the evidence is clearer. The administration’s Completed Actions list documents 646 deregulatory actions across 28 agencies, a trend reflected in GW Regulatory Studies Center’s RegStats data showing a sharp decline in Federal Register pages from 107,262 in 2024 to 61,584 in 2025. That said, 2024 was a midnight regulation year, and a first-year comparison is more revealing. At 61,584 Federal Register pages, 2025 represents the lowest first-year total among recent administrations, falling below Biden’s first year (74,532) and Trump’s first year of his first term (97,874). Economically significant final rules also fell by 66%, from 129 to 43. The administration issued 43 economically significant rules in its first year, which is notably fewer than the 70 and 54 issued during the first years of the Biden and Obama administrations, respectively, though higher than the 23 issued in the first year of Trump’s first term. It’s clear that the administration has prioritized reducing regulatory output, and in that regard, the results are substantive.

Why True Deregulation is Very Difficult

True deregulation would entail an honest accounting of existing regulatory programs, one that leads to a restructuring or deletion of important and ongoing regimes. History shows it can be done — the deregulation of transportation and telecommunications in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that genuine regulatory rollback is achievable under the right political conditions. But it is politically difficult, in part because regulated entities do not always want the regulations they nominally oppose. As Stigler's theory of economic regulation observed, compliance costs can function as barriers to entry that protect incumbents from new competitors — giving established firms an interest in preserving certain regulatory requirements even while opposing others. The picture is not uniform: some industry associations actively push for deregulation while others quietly defend the rules that work in their favor. Absent a broad political will to distinguish between the two, sweeping deregulatory efforts risk clearing obsolete instruments while leaving the most entrenched regulatory barriers intact.

What to Watch Next

The administration has committed to publishing agency-specific cost allowances for FY2026, including individual regulatory budgets that set prospective targets for each agency. That next round of reporting will be a more informative test of the framework than the FY2025 report. Prospective agency budgets are harder to satisfy through retrospective obsolescence-clearing of already-lapsed instruments than through genuine forward-looking cost reduction. The composition of FY2026 actions will reveal whether the pattern identified here persists or gives way to a more substantive record of deregulation. The deeper transparency gap that FY2025 leaves open is the absence of individual cost worksheets for each action. Without them, independent verification of what is driving the Treasury, DHS, and HHS figures, which together account for 92% of reported savings, is not possible from publicly available materials. Publishing those worksheets alongside future accounting reports would allow outside analysts to assess whether the reported savings reflect a real burden reduction for regulated entities and would strengthen the credibility of a framework that, on the evidence from FY2025, raises more questions than it answers.