Obamacare may not be repealed. tax reform may be in limbo, and the president's travel ban may be stuck in the courts. But no one argues that the one area where the president has succeeded is in rolling back the regulatory state that was out of control during the Obama years.

The president's deregulation actions so far have met with widespread approval. On Monday, the president will announce more of his administration's red tape cutting, hoping to put a dent in the more than $80 billion in annualized costs for regulations imposed during the Obama years.

Washington Times:

In a speech in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump will call attention to “the benefit that reform can have for ordinary Americans,” said Neomi Rao, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Mr. Trump also has issued a memo directing federal agencies to lower the overall cost of their regulations in fiscal 2018.

The president has made regulatory reform a priority in his first eight months, issuing an executive order that requires two regulations be eliminated for every new one implemented. So far, Ms. Rao said, the administration has imposed four new rules and eliminated 10.

In a speech to manufacturers on Friday, the president called his administration’s effort “a groundbreaking campaign.”

“We have taken unprecedented steps to remove job-killing regulations that sap the energy, creativity and dynamism from our country,” he said. “We are cutting regulations at a pace that has never even been thought of before.”

He said some regulation is necessary, “but we don’t need 35 regulations to take care of one item. We don’t need to go through nine different agencies to get something taken off. We want beautiful, fast, efficient regulation that works.”

Ms. Reo said the administration’s rulemaking since January has resulted in savings of $300 million in annualized costs for businesses, a marked shift from the first year of the Obama administration.

“In the eight years of the previous administration, they imposed about $80 billion in annualized costs on the private sector,” she said.

According to one study by the Mercator Institute, regulations cost American business $4 trillion. The study "shows that the U.S. regulatory burden alone is bigger than the economies of Germany, France, Brazil, Russia, or the U.K." The Code of Federal Regulations that lists all these rules is now 180,000 pages. Each and every one of those regulations carries with it the force of law. 

Worse, interpreting those laws has become a huge burden for small business who must either hire outside consultants to help them through the maze of regulations, or hire a federal compliance officer. 

Even more bizarrely, those regulations are interpreted by bureaucrats, who can choose to cite a company for not being in compliance based on the bureaucrat's own understanding of the law. Most companies will pay the fine rather than fight a federal agency in court.

It took 50 years to put in place the regulatory state and Trump is not going to fix it in 4 or even 8 years. But he's made a fine start and his successors have a blueprint on how to roll back regulations that stifle growth and entrepreneurship.