Business

Treasury touts regulatory rollbacks

by Niv Elis - 04/24/18 1:37 PM ET

The U.S. Treasury released a report Tuesday promoting its efforts to scale back regulations, a key priority of the Trump administration.

“Regulatory reform is a key component of the President’s plan to make American businesses more competitive and create opportunities for hardworking Americans,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the report, adding that the effort to scale back burdensome regulations would boost economic growth and job creation.

{mosads}In the report, the Treasury Department said that it had taken roughly 100 regulations off its agenda as compared to the previous year, and had either eliminated or proposed to eliminate more than 300 others.

But Amit Narang, a regulatory policy expert at liberal public interest group Public Citizen, said the report doesn’t tell the whole story.

“I do think that they clearly are going in a much more deregulatory direction than under Obama,” Narang said.

For one thing, Narang notes, some regulations in the pipeline are crucial for implementing the GOP’s signature tax law and various financial sanctions.

“Some of the regulations that are in the pipeline seem to be quite important with respect to anti-money laundering and other types of enforcement for financial crimes,” he said.

Narang adds that some of the figures be misleading.

“I think that there might be some material misrepresentations, frankly,” Narang said.

For example, the report said the Treasury Department had issued no new regulations under Executive Order 13771, President Trump’s order to scrap two regulations for every new one.

But public records, Narang noted, show one such new regulation issued in October.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to questions on the disparity.

In February, the administration quietly issued a report on the costs and benefits of regulations to Congress, which found that the benefits of the rules were higher than the costs.

Tags Donald Trump Steven Mnuchin