Early Data on the Deregulatory Push in Washington

My assessment of President Trump's deregulatory agenda so far in 2025.

Oct 28, 2025

The Spring 2025 Unified Agenda, also sometimes called the “regulatory agenda,” was published on Sept. 4. The Unified Agenda is a document that is published twice a year (in theory, in the spring and in the fall) and that previews all of the regulatory actions that federal regulators plan to take over the coming 12 months.

As usual, Wayne Crews was quick to post his analysis, which you can read for yourself here. I want to go a bit deeper, at least in some dimensions.

My first question of the agenda is: Can we call it a deregulatory agenda? To answer that, we need to know how much deregulation can we expect over the next 12 months. Although the rhetoric has largely been that the administration will deregulate whenever and wherever possible, the truth is in the details of what rules actually get published. So the purpose of my analysis today is simply to figure out the percentage of rulemakings in the agenda that appear to be deregulatory in nature. The short answer: more than 60 percent of the rulemakings are deregulatory in nature.

The Big Deregulation Has Begun

The Spring 2025 Unified Agenda lists 3,816 rulemakings — up from 3,331 in the Fall 2024 Agenda under Biden. On raw counts alone, this looks like an expansion, not a rollback. However, in the esoteric world of administrative law (I’ve got to be the first person to ever write that phrase), it requires a “rulemaking” to add to or subtract from the regulatory code. Thus the raw count hides the real story.

By my estimation, about 2,404 of these 3,816 rulemakings (roughly 63 percent) are deregulatory in intent. Let me explain how I arrived at that number. That total count of 2,404 deregulatory actions includes:

1,001 explicitly identified as deregulatory under Executive Order 14192,
701 additional rulemakings with deregulatory titles (terms like rescind, repeal, revoke, remove, delete, abolish, sunset, obsolete), and
702 additional rulemakings with abstracts describing the removal or rescission of existing regulations.

By those metrics, the early data point to an unprecedented wave of deregulatory activity.

The Next Frontier: AI-Assisted Deregulation

I suspect that the next unified agenda will have an even higher percentage of deregulatory rulemakings, as well as a higher total volume of rulemakings. There are several reasons that this will likely be the case:

Traditionally, the spring agenda in a new administration is relatively small compared to the first fall agenda. That’s because it takes considerable time for an administration to get appointees selected, confirmed, and situated, and then those appointees must get their respective agencies to move in the right direction too.
AI will likely play a greater role in helping the administration identify deregulatory targets. AI will augment the deregulatory efforts by doing background legal and economic research to identify, for example, regulations that are authorized but not required by statute, regulations that depend upon vague statutes that could arguably be illegal in a post-Chevron world, or regulations that overlap or conflict with other regulations. See my Nondelegation Project over at Pacific Legal Foundation for an example of how AI can be used to identify potentially illegal regulations.

In traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking, humans select targets, draft rules, and respond to public comments. AI can now play a support role at every stage — from target identification and proposal drafting to automated response analysis during the comment phase. The more the administration uses AI, the more we can expect it to achieve (just like in the private sector!).

Expect a Deregulatory Tsunami in the Fall 2025 Agenda

Agencies plan to update their regulatory (or deregulatory) agendas for the Fall 2025 Unified Agenda. We may not actually see that published until early 2026, but when it comes out, I expect this initial deregulatory wave—large as it is—look relatively small compared to what the Fall Agenda contains.

But even if only the current plans hold, this could become the largest single-year reduction in the federal regulatory code in modern history.