Every Administration Says They’ll Cut Red Tape. Here’s What Actually Happened. | FRTracker

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Published March 2026 · Updated live from FRTracker data

This analysis presents quantitative data from the Federal Register. No legal inferences or policy conclusions are drawn.

Every new president signs an executive order on Day One freezing pending regulations. Every president says they'll cut the bureaucratic burden. And the press dutifully reports the freeze as though it's the first time it's ever happened.

So we counted. FRTracker indexes every document published in the Federal Register — 27,271 of them since inauguration day alone. Here's what the first 14 months of the second Trump administration look like in raw numbers.

The First 55 Days: Three Administrations Compared

Apples to apples. Same window — inauguration day through March 15 — across the last three transitions.

* Documents with "withdraw," "delay," "postpone," or "rescind" in the title. Crude but consistent across administrations.

Trump II's first 55 days produced 35% fewer FR documents than Biden's equivalent period. But look at the deregulatory column — 71 vs 70 vs 66. Every administration starts by withdrawing a comparable number of their predecessor's rules. The regulatory freeze is a constant, not a variable.

Monthly Breakdown Since Inauguration

The deregulatory count (491) sounds high until you put it next to the 2,784 final rules published in the same period. That's 491 deregulatory-titled documents out of 27,271 total FR documents — about 1.8% of all output.

Meanwhile, rules published in the same period contain 21,651 discrete legal obligations. The machine doesn't stop.

Who's Doing the Deregulating?

Commerce Department leads by a wide margin (115 actions), which makes sense — export controls, entity list changes, and trade policy generate a lot of churn regardless of who's in office. Energy and HHS round out the top three.

Significant Deregulatory Actions

Rules flagged as "significant" or "economically significant" by the issuing agency.

The Bottom Line

The regulatory freeze is real, but it's smaller than the rhetoric suggests. Deregulatory-titled actions account for about 2% of the 27,271 documents the Federal Register published since inauguration. Rules published in the same window contain obligations at a pace of ~1,443 per month.

Every administration freezes, every administration thaws. The interesting question isn't whether there's a freeze — it's what happens after.

Methodology

All data sourced from the Federal Register API. "Deregulatory actions" identified by title keywords: withdraw, delay, postpone, rescind, repeal. This is a blunt instrument — some of these are routine administrative actions, and not all deregulation uses these words. But it's consistently blunt across administrations, making comparison valid. Obligation counts are the sum of extracted obligations in documents published in the period (not a net-created measure). See full methodology.

Source: Federal Register API via FRTracker. Methodology →