Cutting Red Tape: The Strategic Partnership Between the Trump Administration and the Center for Regulatory Freedom in 2025

Over the past year, the Trump Administration established a decisive inflection point in federal regulatory policy, moving from a period of rapid expansion of regulations to a sustained effort to minimize administrative state overreach.

The CPAC Center for Regulatory Freedom was instrumental in working with the Trump Administration over the past year, offering key research, comments, and collaborative policy strategies to help fulfill President Trump’s mandate to make America more economically competitive and prosperous. 

By the end of 2024, under the Biden Administration, annual regulatory costs had ballooned to approximately $4 trillion, growing at a rate of 15% per year, which threatened to reach nearly $7 trillion by 2029. The Trump Administration successfully reversed this disaster in 2025, ending the year with regulatory costs at $3.8 trillion, roughly $800 billion below the projected path. This shift sought to relieve cost-of-living pressures for the everyday American embedded in energy, housing, and transportation, directly improving household purchasing power without new federal spending.

CRF filed more than sixty comments and participated in over one hundred regulatory proceedings across twenty-five federal agencies in 2025. CRF utilized a comprehensive regulatory reform agenda to prioritize high-impact proceedings and intervene early in the policy-making process. This engagement focused on the need for enforcing cost-benefit discipline and challenging the expansion of sub-regulatory policymaking.

A central component of this strategy involved confronting the structural incentives that encourage bureaucratic overreach through the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE was designed to identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and mission drift while resetting the internal baseline for federal agencies. 

In addition to these early institutional changes, the Trump Administration scrapped Biden-era revisions to Circular A-4 to restore objective cost-benefit analysis as the foundation of regulatory decision-making. This action eliminated the use of "phantom metrics" and subjective valuations that had previously allowed agencies to justify nearly any policy outcome, ensuring that future regulations are tethered to measurable economic reality.

An assortment of sector-based victories illustrates the practical impact of these combined efforts. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began moving away from expansive greenhouse gas regulatory frameworks and initiated a reconsideration of the ambition and structure of corporate average fuel economy standards. At the Department of Transportation, reforms addressed long-standing race- and sex-based presumptions in DBE and ACDBE programs to reduce the administrative distortions that inflate national infrastructure costs. Additionally, the Department of Labor successfully rolled back pandemic-era recordkeeping requirements, reinforcing the principle that emergency authorities should not become permanent fixtures of the regulatory state.

Further accomplishments in 2025 included significant interventions in financial and antitrust enforcement. CRF submitted comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding the Omnicom–IPG merger, urging the commission to reject expansive "theories of harm" and respect First Amendment considerations. The FTC’s subsequent decision to adhere to traditional, evidence-based antitrust principles preserved analytical standards and prevented the use of merger reviews as a vehicle for content regulation. CRF also challenged overreaching Information Collection Requests (ICRs) under the Paperwork Reduction Act, resulting in several agencies withdrawing or narrowing data-collection obligations that functioned as de facto regulation for small businesses.

These 2025 initiatives by the Trump Administration resulted in a record 5.31% reduction in regulatory costs and $211 billion in net savings reported by the Office of Management and Budget. Beyond immediate cost relief, these reforms regained trillions of dollars in opportunity costs by removing barriers to investment, innovation, and productivity growth. The Trump Administration, with the help of CRF, has established a new benchmark for regulatory discipline that prioritizes national economic strength and competitiveness. This sustained commitment to regulatory freedom ensures that America remains competitive and prosperous by preventing the administrative state from expanding faster than the economy it governs.