On April 9, 2025, President Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum titled “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations,” marking a significant step in the Administration’s push to deregulate under the broader DOGE initiative. President Trump’s recent memorandum directs all executive departments and agencies to identify “certain categories of unlawful and potentially unlawful regulations within 60 days and begin plans to repeal them.” The Administration prioritizes regulations that do not align with recent Supreme Court rulings affecting constitutional limits on agency powers. The key Supreme Court rulings are listed in the directive and include:
President Trump also directs executive agencies to repeal any regulations agencies or agency heads deem unlawful with celerity, bypassing typical notice-and-comment periods where the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) “good cause” exception applies. Agencies are to repeal regulations unilaterally without notice-and-comment periods where such review periods would be “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” 5 U.S.C. § 553(b)(B). Ordinarily, good cause exists in the following circumstances:
- there is some exigent emergency (i.e., where the FAA addressed suspension/revocation of student pilot certificates following the attacks of September 11),
- where notice would subvert the underlying statutory scheme (i.e., in the context of price controls—consider the oil crisis of the 1970s); and
- where Congress intends to waive the notice and comment requirements (i.e. where Congress imposes certain procedures and a deadline which cannot be met without waiving the APA’s requirements).
This directive signals an aggressive push toward deregulation across all executive agencies. Agencies have until May 20, 2025 to review and identify unlawful regulations and “shall immediately takes steps to effectuate the repeal of any regulation, or the portion of any regulation, that clearly exceeds the agency’s statutory authority or is otherwise unlawful.” Should an agency opt not to repeal a previously identified regulation, the agencies must submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a one-page summary of each regulation not repealed and the basis for not repealing the regulation.
The implications of President Trump’s directive cannot be overstated. Since 1976, federal agencies have published nearly 222,000 rules, totaling over 1 million pages of enacted rules in the Federal Register. Since 2000, federal agencies have published just shy of 612,000 notices of proposed rules (~1.4 million additional pages published), and the Federal Register has published over 771,000 documents related to these proposed and enacted rules. All told federal agencies have published nearly 3.3 million pages of rules, regulations, comments, etc. since 1976.
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