If it is a day ending with the letter “y,” there is probably some all-consuming media controversy involving President Donald Trump. But underneath the headlines and tweetstorms, the Trump administration, and even a normally reluctant Congress (at least to some degree), has already teamed up make the biggest dent in the federal regulatory state we’ve seen during the 21st century. And if the GOP manages to follow through with other planned reforms, Trump may challenge the deregulatory records of even Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter
This threatened deconstruction of the administrative state has put many libertarian think tankers in the dissonant position of rooting hard for one aspect of a presidency they otherwise root against, and dusting off their knowledge of how much the executive branch can do on its own to peel back agencies that Congress willed into existence. As Matt Welch writes in Reason’s June cover story, “Washington’s regulatory reformers, largely sidelined for the past quarter-century, are infiltrating the halls of federal power and attempting to engineer the most ambitious executive-branch overhaul in at least three decades.”
On the day of Trump’s [address to a joint session of Congress], I paid a visit to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian nonprofit focusing on regulatory issues, to speak with Myron Ebell, director of the institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. Ebell had been the Trump transition team’s point man at the EPA, a personnel selection witheringly characterized by former League of Conservation Voters official Daniel Weiss as “like picking Colonel Sanders to protect your chickens.” So what can libertarians expect from the Trump administration? “I think,” Ebell says, “he could be the most serious deregulatory president ever.”
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