Trump admin maps out sweeping rollback of regulations in push to save $1.5T

$1.5 trillion is not a rounding error. It is seven times last year's record, and last year's was already the biggest number an administration had ever put on paper. Whatever you think of the individual rules, that scale tells you something: the regulatory state didn't grow by accident, and unwinding it takes more than a few press releases about "cutting red tape."

The real test isn't the headline figure, though. It's whether 702 rules actually get repealed or just quietly reappear under new names two years from now, the way these things sometimes do. Agencies are good at rewriting a rule just enough to dodge the paperwork that killed the last version. If this administration wants credit for the savings, it needs to show its work rule by rule, not just hand out a number and move on.

Still, there's something refreshing about a White House treating regulatory cost like actual money instead of an abstraction nobody has to answer for. Businesses and workers feel that money whether Washington bothers to count it or not. Getting the count right, and making the cuts stick, is the part that will decide if this is reform or just a very expensive press release.