Press Release

2020: The Year in Regulation

In a new retrospective, AAF’s Director of Regulatory Policy Dan Bosch and Senior Regulatory Policy Analyst Dan Goldbeck examine the results of the federal government’s regulatory policy in 2020. Last year the administration increased net regulatory costs for the second consecutive year — $14.7 billion net across all agencies, Bosch and Goldbeck note.

Their central points:

  • This net total is remarkable considering the Trump Administration published the largest deregulatory action of its term in 2020, which saved $200 billion;
  • Newly added paperwork hours also hit a new high for the administration, topping last year’s previous high by more than 600 percent; and
  • The changing political balance also opens up the possibility that some of the Trump Administration’s most significant actions from August 21st onward could be vulnerable to rescission under the Congressional Review Act.

Read the research.

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