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In brief...
After reaching a historic peak in 2024, the “midnight year” of the Biden administration, the total number of Federal Register pages fell sharply in 2025 in the first year of Trump’s second term.
The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center recently updated its RegStats database with rulemaking data for the first year of President Trump’s second term in office. RegStats is a data repository that tracks federal regulatory activities over time, across presidential administrations, and between agencies. This commentary reviews the latest data and charts on regulatory activity during the administration’s first year in office, focusing on significant rules, economically significant rules, and Federal Register pages published from January 2025 to January 2026, and comparing these measures with those of previous administrations.
The monthly pattern of significant final rules reflects a slower pace than that observed during the first year of the Biden administration. Rather than an early, front-loaded surge, rulemaking activity increased gradually, with notable increases emerging in the middle of summer. July 2025 stands out as an early inflection point with 4 economically significant and 18 other significant rules, followed by a second wave of activity in the final months of the year, culminating in a pronounced uptick in January 2026.
A major spike in the last year of the Biden administration occurred in April and May of 2024 with the administration issuing around 61 economically significant rules and 53 other significant, which may reflect the “midnight” regulation phenomenon discussed in previous RSC commentary.
Through its first year in office, the second Trump administration’s cumulative issuance of economically significant final rules has grown at a moderate pace. While the early months show steady accumulation, the overall trajectory remains below the first-year totals of the Biden and Obama administrations, which finalized 70 and 54 economically significant rules, respectively. By January 2026, the Trump 47 administration had issued 43 such rules, with cumulative totals increasing steadily over the course of the year.
Regulatory activity is also reflected in the Federal Register page count. This is a broad measure that captures significant and non-significant rules, presidential documents, and other agency notices on which we track data going back to the 1930s. Since regulations can only be removed through the same procedures that agencies took to issue them, one would expect more evidence of regulatory activity to achieve the President’s stated goal of deregulation (i.e., final rules and Federal Register pages).
The slower pace observed in this first year may reflect a broader pattern seen across presidential administrations. Regulatory activity typically accelerates in an administration’s final year, followed by a noticeable slowdown during the first year of a new administration. After reaching a historic peak of 107,262 pages in 2024, the “midnight year” of the Biden administration, the total number of Federal Register pages fell sharply in 2025 to 61,584, representing a 43.3% decline. Similarly, a comparison of the first years of recent administrations shows lower levels of activity last year. Federal Register page counts totaled 97,874 in the first year of President Trump’s first term (2016) and 74,532 in the first year of President Biden’s term (2021).
While year-to-year fluctuations remain evident across administrations, a surprising longer-term pattern emerges. Agencies are issuing fewer significant rules than in earlier decades, but the Federal Register is getting longer. This may suggest that individual rules are increasing in scope and complexity
Over the longer term, federal agencies have issued fewer final rules. Economically significant rulemaking declined sharply between 2024 and 2025, falling from 129 to 44 rules (–66%), while total final rules dropped by roughly 26% over the period of 2024-2025. In historical context, agencies issued approximately 4,500 final rules annually in the late 1990s, compared with about 2,300 in 2025. At the same time, the increasing length of Federal Register documents suggests that regulatory activity may be concentrated in fewer but more expansive or detailed actions, rather than spread across a larger number of discrete rules.
As this commentary highlights, a single metric of federal regulation often fails to capture the full picture of the volume of regulatory changes. That is why our RegStats continues to track multiple measures of regulation over an extended period, providing objective statistics for the regulatory and research community.