The Trump administration roared into office last year promising to cut “thousands” of rules with the assistance of “the sharpest . . . legal minds in America.” Believing political winds and the Supreme Court’s supermajority to be at their backs, the incoming administration was promising a deregulatory avalanche.
A year in, the picture is taking clearer shape. It’s slightly more complicated than the rhetoric suggests. True to its word, the administration is aggressively slashing environmental, health, and consumer safeguards, often using unprecedented legal theories. But agencies have also sometimes resisted the White House’s most ambitious commands, like indiscriminately phasing out existing rules or broadly skipping public comment to repeal others. A year of tracking the Federal Register reveals an administration that is pushing the envelope while occasionally pulling its punches.
Expansive Applications of Recent Supreme Court Decisions
Underlying many of the Trump administration’s repeal efforts is its claim that existing regulations are unlawful. In April, President Trump issued a memorandum “directing the repeal of unlawful regulations” requiring agency heads to identify and swiftly rescind rules that they believe are inconsistent with a list of ten Supreme Court decisions from the past decade. An Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum provided further instruction.
Not surprisingly, the first two Supreme Court decisions laid out in these memos were Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024) and West Virginia v. EPA (2022). Loper Bright overturned the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, under which courts deferred to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of statutes they administer. Without that deference, agencies face greater judicial scrutiny of their regulatory decisions. West Virginia formally established the major questions doctrine, which holds that agencies cannot claim unprecedented and transformative authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization.
Trump administration agencies have frequently and aggressively cited these two decisions over the past year to justify regulatory rollbacks and attempt to curtail agency authority. The administration’s broad invocation of recent Supreme Court decisions to claim a lack of regulatory authority reflects a calculated gamble: While agencies could face judicial pushback for misapplying legal precedents, any court victories would likely be particularly durable because they would undercut the agency’s authority to regulate in the future. For instance, in proposing to rescind major climate regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has argued that key sections of the Clean Air Act do not authorize the agency to control climate pollution, considering the major questions doctrine and Loper Bright. This position effectively invites the Supreme Court to overturn contrary caselaw—a move that, if successful, could prevent EPA from regulating climate pollution under a future administration.
This has been a consistent pattern: Agencies arguing that they lack regulatory authority and, in so doing, essentially inviting courts to overturn existing precedent. Agencies have done this through various theories that would expand the reach of recent Supreme Court case law. With Loper Bright, in particular, agencies have sometimes overlooked or stretched key facets of the Supreme Court’s opinion. For instance, agencies have claimed that Loper Bright compels them to rescind existing regulations that courts (including the Supreme Court) upheld under Chevron, despite the decision’s explicit instruction that prior opinions upholding agency actions under Chevron remain good law. While agencies could potentially rescind regulations in these circumstances in their reasoned discretion, they cannot argue that they must rescind these rules without assessing otherwise relevant policy concerns.
Agencies have paid selective attention to other key Loper Bright stipulations. For instance, while Loper Bright recognizes that “the statute’s meaning may well be that the agency is authorized to exercise a degree of discretion,” agencies have sometimes read statutes to limit their discretion to prohibit extant regulations even where prior court decisions have recognized the agency’s broad discretion under that statute. Loper Bright also calls for “great respect” for agencies’ longtime regulatory approaches, yet agencies have sometimes rescinded longstanding rules based on Loper Bright without even recognizing this key principle.
The administration has invoked West Virginia less frequently to justify regulatory repeals, but there too, it has inappropriately invoked the Court’s reasoning to upset judicial precedents. As noted above, EPA improperly relied on the major questions doctrine in proposing to rescind some longstanding climate regulations, even though the Supreme Court has held that the Clean Air Act authorizes such regulation. In another proposal, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration relied on a dissenting D.C. Circuit opinion from then-Judge Kavanaugh to claim that the agency cannot regulate inherently risky activities from dangerous professions. In essence, agencies are selectively using the major questions doctrine to try to overturn settled judicial precedents, although the doctrine does no such thing.
Aggressive Curtailment of Notice-and-Comment
The administration has also pushed the boundaries of the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) public participation requirements. Under the APA, agencies must generally present proposed rules—including deregulatory ones—for public comment before issuing them in final form. This ‘notice-and-comment’ process is a bedrock of administrative law, ensuring that affected parties and the public can weigh in before regulations take effect. But there are exceptions to this requirement that the administration has frequently invoked in expansive ways, in some instances using untested theories to relieve agencies from their notice-and-comment obligations.
This strategy has taken many forms. For instance, the APA’s exception to public comment for rules related to foreign affairs has traditionally been limited to core foreign affairs and diplomatic functions. But in March, the State Department announced a much broader interpretation that included all efforts by the federal government “to control the status, entry, and exit of people, and the transfer of goods, services, data, technology, and other items across the borders of the United States.” The Department of Homeland Security later cited this expansive interpretation as a reason to forgo notice and comment on its rules ending automatic employment authorization extensions for foreign nationals and relaxing visa requirements for religious workers.
As another example, the APA’s public benefits exemption to notice-and-comment requirements has traditionally been limited to the direct administration of public benefit programs. But the Department of Justice (DOJ) stretched this exemption in its rule eliminating liability for disparate-impact discrimination under Title VI. The exemption traditionally applies to rules governing how agencies administer federal grants or benefits like Social Security. DOJ argued it applied here because Title VI governs recipients of federal funding, representing a significant expansion of the exemption’s scope. And in a slew of rules, agencies cited the APA exception for “rules of agency organization, procedure, and practice” as a basis not to take comment on their removals of rules implementing procedures for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, even though that exemption has also been interpreted narrowly to not include rules that encode substantive value judgments.
We could go on. Agencies have tested other limits on the APA’s good cause exception, which allows agencies to skip public comment when it would be impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest. Some agencies have bizarrely suggested that public comment is irrelevant when an agency acts at the direction of the president, and at times substantially shortened public comment windows. Viewed together, these examples depict an administration reluctant to meaningfully engage with the public, instead preferring to deregulate broadly and quickly with little public input.
Limited and Lopsided Analysis
A year of tracking the Federal Register also reveals an administration loath to show its work or engage in well-reasoned regulatory analysis.
For many regulations, agencies typically submit their proposed rules alongside detailed analyses explaining the rationale and motivation for their actions. But in some recent rules, agencies have broken from this longstanding and judicially mandated practice, instead offering barebones proposals lacking any detail or meaningful analysis. For instance, in its rescissions of over twenty water and energy conservation standards, the Department of Energy made sweeping claims that the rules were not economically justified or necessary but provided little economic or analytical support for its assertions.
Alongside barebones proposals, agencies have also proposed rules that rely on slipshod regulatory and economic analyses. Regulatory analyses must be well-reasoned, even-handed, and use up-to-date models, methodologies, and scientific assumptions. But recently, agencies have been quick to bend the requirements of cost-benefit analysis, cherry-pick data, and rest on supposed analytical uncertainty to justify ignoring the impacts of their actions. Increasingly, agencies are focusing only on the cost of regulatory requirements while practically ignoring the benefits.
For example, in a rule delaying the implementation of certain wastewater standards, EPA relied on a single, outlier scenario to suggest its proposal would have positive net benefits, ignoring the (more likely) scenarios that indicated the opposite. And in numerous rules, the administration has abandoned its obligation to consider the climate impacts of its actions, instead suggesting that methods for assessing such damages are “highly uncertain.” This conclusion is simply inconsistent with well-established science and economics.
This vague appeal to uncertainty is expected to continue, as EPA recently announced its intention to stop its decades-long practice of quantifying the mortality and health effects of certain air pollutants due to concern that such estimation provides a “false sense of precision and . . . confidence.” These and other examples depict an administration willing to cut corners and disregard regulatory benefits in the name of deregulation.
An Exercise in Restraint?
And yet, while agencies continue to push the boundaries of reasoned decisionmaking, there remains some daylight between their practice and what the most extreme presidential directives command.
Compliance with President Trump’s Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting executive order presents a stark illustration. In April 2025, the president issued an executive order calling on almost a dozen federal agencies to conditionally sunset potentially all of their existing regulations under key statutes (to “sunset” a rule means to attach a date after which the rule will expire). The order’s stated purpose is to alleviate burdens on energy production, but by its text it applies broadly and with few exemptions. Agencies were given less than six months to comply.
While the order generated significant public buzz, compliance has been lackluster at best. Of the 11 agencies subject to the order, only two have released rules in response, neither within the six-month deadline. The first, issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, targeted 53 largely obsolete or redundant rules in a move that was generally seen as uncontroversial. In the second, issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency determined that most of its regulations should remain on the books. As a result, the rule sunsets a narrow set of regulations the agency determined were seldom-used or duplicative. To be sure, the two sunset rules suffered from their own procedural and analytical flaws. But they fell well short of the extreme, rule-slashing frenzy imagined by the executive order.
And while agencies have been quick to rely on recent Supreme Court decisions as a basis for deregulation, they have been largely unwilling to do so using the streamlined process outlined in the president’s deregulatory memorandum. In addition to directing agencies to repeal purportedly unlawful regulations, the order called on agencies to “finalize rules without notice and comment,” suggesting that rescinding unlawful regulations was permissible under the APA’s “good cause” exception. This mandate was repeated in two follow-on orders from OMB, which suggested that taking public comment on such rescissions would be “superfluous” and “unnecessary.” Despite this directive, deregulating without notice-and-comment has been the exception, not the rule. In many of the year’s most significant deregulatory actions, agencies have followed traditional procedures for seeking public input, including the provision of public hearings and comment periods.
Finally, while agencies have taken aggressive views of Loper Bright and the major questions doctrine where it serves their deregulatory goals, they have at other times taken more restrained views of these cases. For instance, DOJ adopted a narrow view of the major questions doctrine in defending the president’s tariffs before the Supreme Court. In at least two rules, agencies have resisted calls to apply West Virginia, stressing that the major questions doctrine applies in only the most “extraordinary” cases. And agencies in various contexts have argued that Loper Bright affords them broad discretion to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme.
***
In its first year, the second Trump administration moved quickly and aggressively to rescind many environmental, health, and consumer regulations. Yet while the president and others in his administration have boasted about gutting the administrative state, agencies have restrained at times from fully axing their regulatory programs.
The impact and efficacy of this approach remain uncertain, as the administration’s envelope-pushing deregulatory theories will be tested in courts as more regulations are finalized this year.
