Americans Can Finally Breathe Again

Breathing Again

Amid all the reaction to Donald Trump’s decisive and reassuring victory in the presidential election this week, perhaps the best sentiment expressed—at least it struck a chord personally with me—was a hair stylist’s declaration that she felt like she could breathe again.

“Everyone we know is so tired, like somebody’s foot has been on the American people’s chest for the past four years,” small business owner Amanda DiAntonio told The Wall Street Journal.

She was talking specifically about inflation, but she could just as easily have been talking about the regulatory burden that she and other entrepreneurs face every day in their lives. And not just entrepreneurs. That “somebody” with their foot on the American people’s chest is the bureaucratic machine that runs the government’s unelected regulatory state.

DiAntonio told The Journal that she could now let out a big exhale with Trump’s victory. No doubt, and no doubt it would be even bigger if she knew how much different things would have been in the regulatory universe had Kamala Harris prevailed.

Not many Americans think too much about the pervasive control government has over our lives through the administrative state. They should. While it’s understandable that not much time is given to handwringing over the regulatory behemoth, given open borders, the U.S. government’s wild warmongering, and inflation, it nonetheless matters because long-term the administrative state poses the biggest existential threat to liberty, and it would have become an immediate crisis had Harris won the election.

Actually, it’s a crisis already, it’s just that now help is on the way. In his single term in office, Joe Biden sought greatness, and that he achieved if you define greatness as unleashing the most massive regulatory onslaught since FDR. Biden took civil servitude to new heights.

According to a study by the National Association of Manufacturers, the total cost of federal regulations in 2022 was an estimated $3.079 trillion—or 12 per cent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product and more than the manufacturing sector’s entire economic output. For small business owners, the regulatory burden was crushing: an estimated $50,100 per employee per year.

No wonder DiAntonio though there was a foot on her chest. There was, and Biden came to the White House wearing a bigger, heavier boot. In the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2024 regulatory round-up, Ten Thousand Commandments, Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., put that into perspective:

“During calendar year 2023, agencies issued 3,018 rules, whereas Congress enacted 68 laws,” Crews wrote. “Thus, agencies issued 44 rules for every law enacted by Congress.”

In addition, the year-end 2023 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions proposed 3,599 regulatory actions flowing through the pipeline, and the number of high-significance rules in the Biden pipeline outnumbered the Bush, Obama, and Trump years: “Biden’s three years have averaged 870 rules annually in the Federal Register affecting small business, compared with 694 and 701 for Obama and Trump, respectively,” he wrote.

What’s more, Crews wrote, Biden-era mandates affect state and local governments at heights not seen in over a decade, with rules affecting state governments numbering 507 and rules affecting local governments totaling 349.

Biden, Harris: We Want to Oppress You

It’s not just numbers. Biden has pursued a whole-of-government philosophy by which policy objectives are pursued by directing every federal agency to pursue the policy, using whatever means it has at its disposal, whether that policy has any jurisdictional relevance to the agency or not.

The goal is total control.

“Let’s be clear, Kamala and I came into office determined to transform how the economy works—change the way it literally functions,” Biden said last September.

Harris never disagreed with that statement, and, given that she acknowledged on The View that she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from the Biden years, we have to assume that she would have forged the Biden regulatory signature on her regulatory decrees during her term in office.

In fact, the evidence suggests that she was as dedicated as Biden was to significantly expand its scope, taking the administrative state to unprecedented heights

For instance, she was in favor of expanding the reach of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to help union organizing. That would require legislation, but Harris announced support for that legislation during the campaign, supporting a bill that would have abolished state right-to-work laws while also unleashing the NLRB, enabling it to further tighten the rules for independent contracting, and to issue collective bargaining orders (automatic unionization without an election) if the employer commits even minor violations before a union election.

Harris also signaled that she would have become more aggressive on broadband regulation by greenlighting the FCC to outlaw zero-rating data plans—plans that would allow customers to stream services without exhausting their monthly data. Lower cost options would be denied to consumers; prices would increase.

In addition, the vice president supported an effort to allow the FCC to regulate internet service providers as utilities, which directly violates the congressional intent of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that purposely applied a lighter regulatory touch on information services. Indeed, that law’s policy statement reads: “Is the policy of the United States— … ‘‘to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”

And if past is prologue—and it is—Harris has in the past supported a climate plan far more aggressive than Biden’s, including calling for a 100-percent EV mandate by 2035, doubling the contributions of the U.S to global climate initiatives, and banning oil and gas extraction on federal lands.

Not least, she supported the “protection” of 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by 2030, which must involve the taking of private land, either through purchase, conservation easements or eminent domain. The Biden administration has already removed local governments’ veto power over federal land acquisitions, and Harris went even further in her commitment to federal control of land use, including advocacy for more restrictions on multiple uses of federal lands such as reducing roads and eliminating grazing, mining, and oil and gas development.

So we can be thankful Harris lost, and we can breathe easier knowing the heavy foot of regulation will be somewhat lightened. All of which brings us to the incoming Trump administration. We do not yet know all the specifics, but we know enough to confidently say that, instead of unprecedented regulation, this time around with Trump, we will have unprecedented deregulation.

Reformers Gone Wild

First, it’s a no-brainer but the top items on the Trump administration’s to-do list will be to overturn or abandon the aforementioned regulatory menu of a Harris administration.

Second, expect Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to lay waste to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Throughout the final weeks of the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would let Kennedy “run wild,” at least up to a point, and on election night Trump said he told him “to go have fun.” Behind Trump’s humor is a deadly serious effort to clean up bureaucratic corruption in federal public health agencies, to decommission what in fact are unhealthy programs designed to serve Big Food and Big Pharma interests, and to put entire departments within the FDA onto the trash heap.

“In some categories … there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job, they’re not protecting our kids,” Kennedy said in a post-election interview.

That last point is instructive. The FDA has for decades served to promote corporate and bureaucratic interests—to feather the nests of the special interests and to bolster public health bureaucratic control of the health of the American people. To cite just one example, the agency quietly revised its guidelines for nutritional content, and among the items it targeted as unhealthy—wait for it—were cherries and cranberries, the latter a major crop in Wisconsin and vital to many small farmers.

That’s an erroneous conclusion that is too complicated to be dissected here, but suffice it to say that it would be economically costly to the private sector, though any health benefit is vigorously contested. Thankfully, the proposed labeling drew a robust and bipartisan response from the state’s congressional delegation.

Trump has also tasked Kennedy with tackling chronic disease, especially in children and particularly processed foods and chemicals in food. The CDC bureaucrats should not be resting easy, either. Expect efforts to reduce the revolving door between industry and the bureaucracy, and for the administration to begin to turn off the spigot to exponential funds flowing from corporations into agency coffers.

All in all, expect a wild ride in the public health agencies. Right away, expect Big Pharma’s and Big Food’s control of FDA nutritional guidelines to fall by the wayside.

There’s another broad sweep on the regulatory horizon that would have a huge impact. In speeches, Trump has declared that he intends to pressure agencies to enforce only requirements that are codified in black and white, or to enforce only rules written based explicitly on specific statutory language, and not to pursue violations of policy infractions or failures to obey guidance documents. There would be resistance and a tug of war, but even the effort would be groundbreaking.

In addition, the Trump administration is expected to introduce its own whole-of government approach, and one of its guiding principles in that regard will be power sharing through a new interpretation of cooperative federalism—an idea that federal power is shared with state and local governments. It will lean more on modern conservative notions that the federal government must coordinate its regulatory actions with other government entities at the state and local level. This could become the basis for attacking the vertical integration of agencies that exists now, in which state agencies surrender to the will and way of federal agencies almost exclusively and many times in conflict with that state’s elected representatives.

Also expect the reintroduction of the “rule in-rule out” requirement in some form, in which a certain number of rules must be removed for every new rule enacted.

Beyond the broad sweeps, any number of significant specific deregulatory actions are already on the table or being prepared. The incoming administration is expected to reduce funding for high-speed rail projects, for instance. Biden’s EV regulations are on the chopping block as well, as is the entire Environmental Protection Agency. One line of attack will to severely reduce the EPA’s budget to force it to narrow its regulatory reach.

Other almost certain actions will be to scuttle the EPA’s environmental and social justice programs, not to mention immediate efforts to boost domestic production of oil. Permitting times, which have slowed to a crawl in the Biden-Harris regime, will be expedited, including a 50 percent reduction in the time it takes to approve drilling permits on public lands.

The Paris Climate Agreement? The U.S. will be out, again. Emissions restrictions on power plants and vehicles? Reduced or Gone.

Expect significant reform in the arena of education, too, which might become Trump’s most pivotal cultural rollback of the regulatory state. For starters, most in the administration would like simply to abolish the federal Department of Education. That’s not likely to happen, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant actions being loaded into the queue.

For starters, Biden’s new Title IX rules will vanish like a fog under a hot morning sun. There will be new efforts to dismantle regulations built around affirmative action and DEI regulation. The expansion of school choice will get strong support.

There’s a lot more, but in sum, one of the Trump administration’s top priorities will be to reduce the regulatory burden on the American people, whereas the Harris agenda would have been to increase that burden. At the top of this oversight effort will be Elon Musk, who will lead in some capacity an Office of Government Efficiency. Musk envisions cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget.

That would be transformative in and of itself, even if he only comes close. With Trump and Musk are a dream team of reformers who can make history if they work together—Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy. And don’t count out the always insightful counsel of Tucker Carlson.

The bottom line is, the nation is set for a bureaucratic reduction—call it a revolution (but not an insurrection!)— the likes of which it has never seen, and one in which the bureaucratic state will have to muster all its power to resist. Trump will face many challenges, too, in accomplishing that reduction, not least from within the deep state itself. The battle will be fierce because by all indications from the incoming team, they are embarking on nothing less than the early stages of the demotion of the administrative state..

It would be so easy to say that democracy hangs in the balance. That liberty is on the line. But the job before us now can be stated in less lofty though no less important terms: The task of this new administration is to build a world in which the Amanda DiAntonios of this nation—the middle and working classes, the average people, that make us great—never have to worry about breathing again.

Nothing makes happiness more than to inhale the air of freedom.