“The guiding light of the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts was Executive Order 13771. That 2017 order instituted the famous rule that regulators issue two deregulatory actions for every new regulatory action. It also created a system of accounting for the costs of new regulations and the cost savings of deregulatory actions. This was used to give federal departments regulatory budgets that limited the costs of new regulations they could impose, and often required them to find regulatory savings.
Using this measurement of regulatory savings, the Trump administration has been modestly successful at its goal of deregulating the economy, claiming $198 billion in eliminated regulatory costs. From fiscal years 2017–2019, the administration claims to have eliminated 3.6 rules for every new rule added. That ratio is 3.2 for fiscal year 2020.
Using other measurements, the Trump administration has been less successful. In some areas, they’ve done more to slow the growth of the administrative state without significantly reducing it. The length of the Code of Federal Regulations stayed essentially flat during Trump’s time in office, hovering at around 185,000 pages. The Mercatus Center’s tracker of restrictive words in the federal regulatory code comes to a similar result, finding that these words grew from 1.08 million at the beginning of Trump’s term to 1.09 million as of January 1, 2021.
Trump “leaves us with fewer regulations than Hillary Clinton would have—though not many fewer regulations than we had before,” summarizes Robert Verbruggen in a November National Review article.
One can expect this limited progress to be more than reversed under the new administration. Biden has already announced plans to reinstate Obama-era regulations that were pared back by the Trump administration.”
https://reason.com/2021/01/19/will-joe-biden-destroy-trumps-legacy-of-deregulation/