# Deregulation **Deregulation** is the reduction or elimination of government regulation over industry — framed by proponents as removing barriers to growth and by critics as dismantling public protections for private profit. It has been a core objective of the American right since the 1970s, running through telecommunications, airlines, finance, energy and the environment, and accelerating sharply under both Trump administrations. ## Three mechanisms, not one The word covers three quite different operations, and conflating them is the commonest error in writing about it. The vault keeps them distinct because they have different actors, different reversibility, and different evidentiary standards. **Legislative repeal.** Congress amends or removes the statute. Slow, visible, durable, and rare. Airline deregulation in 1978 and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall's separation are the canonical cases — and worth noting, both were bipartisan. **Rulemaking rollback.** The agency rewrites or withdraws its own rules under the Administrative Procedure Act. Faster, less visible, and reversible by the next administration, which is why so much environmental and labour policy now oscillates on a four-year cycle rather than settling. **Deregulation by starvation.** No rule changes at all. Budgets, staff and enforcement capacity are cut until the rule is nominally in force and practically unenforced. This is the form the vault sees most in the current period — the IRS losing roughly a third of its revenue agents, the [[CFPB]] defunded rather than repealed — and it is the hardest to litigate, because there is no agency action to challenge. ## The judicial arm The conservative legal project has supplied a fourth route that operates on all agencies at once. The Supreme Court's 2024 overturning of **Chevron deference** in *Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo* stripped agencies of the presumption that courts should defer to their reading of ambiguous statutes — shifting interpretive authority from expert agencies to generalist judges, permanently and across every regulatory domain. Paired with the major-questions doctrine, it converts each significant rule into litigation the agency must win rather than a decision it gets to make. That is why the vault files deregulation alongside [[Unitary Executive Theory]] and the [[Administrative State]] material rather than under economic policy alone: the object is not any particular rule but the *capacity* to make rules. ## The argument on the merits Held honestly, the case is not empty. Airline and trucking deregulation lowered prices; some regulatory regimes did entrench incumbents; compliance cost is real and falls hardest on small firms. The vault records this because the strongest version of the opposing case is the one worth engaging, and because "deregulation" that consolidates an industry is a common enough outcome to be worth predicting. The counter-case is equally concrete: financial deregulation preceded both the savings-and-loan crisis and 2008, and the pattern in which an industry's own lobbying determines which rules go is [[Regulatory Capture]] operating through the deregulatory process rather than against it. ## See Also - [[Administrative State]] — the governance structure deregulation targets - [[Regulatory Capture]] — the mechanism that shapes which rules go - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] — the constitutional theory behind the judicial arm - [[CFPB]] — the current test case for deregulation by starvation - [[Power of the Purse]] — the appropriations mechanism starvation runs through - [[Discount Rates as Policy Choices]] — how the rate used to convert future costs into present value determines the answer to nearly every long-horizon policy question - [[The Value of a Statistical Life]] — the dollar figure regulatory analysis assigns to mortality risk reduction, and what happens when it is set to zero