The Daily Fuckup

On February 28, the Trump administration put more institutional weight behind its campaign to strip away federal regulation, formally endorsing a trio of House bills designed to make rule-cutting faster, broader, and harder to undo. The timing was notable: the endorsement landed on the same day the president was addressing Congress, giving the White House a chance to project one message in public while advancing a far more aggressive governing agenda in the background. This was not just another flourish about cutting red tape. It was a formal policy statement from the Office of Management and Budget, a signal that the administration wanted Congress to help turn a campaign slogan into an operating principle. The bills were tied to Trump’s January 30 executive order on controlling regulatory costs, which had already made the administration’s basic view plain enough. Regulations, under this approach, were not presumptively useful tools of governance; they were liabilities to be reduced whenever possible. The result was a posture that looked less like selective reform than a deliberate effort to bring a wrecking ball to the federal rulebook.

The substance of the push was not complicated. Trump ran on shrinking the scope of government, and it was no surprise that his team would look for ways to reduce federal requirements that business interests and conservative allies have long viewed as burdensome. But the language surrounding the endorsement suggested a more sweeping and less measured ambition than ordinary cleanup. In the formal statement, regulation was cast as a drag on liberty and efficiency, as if the modern administrative state were not the product of legislation, court rulings, agency expertise, and decades of political compromise, but simply an arbitrary weight placed on the private sector. That framing may resonate with voters who feel boxed in by bureaucracy, and some of those complaints are plainly real. Yet it also carries an obvious danger: once every rule is treated as suspect, the line between obsolete paperwork and basic protections can disappear. Clean air standards, workplace safety rules, consumer safeguards, and similar guardrails do not become less important because a White House wants to look forceful. What the administration presented as liberation could easily be read as an attempt to hollow out the systems that make daily life safer, more predictable, and less subject to abuse.

What made the moment stand out was the scale and speed of it. This was still the early stretch of the administration, before anyone could reasonably say the White House had settled into a stable governing rhythm, and the message was that haste itself counted as a virtue. The administration did not merely want to signal hostility to regulation; it wanted to make that hostility repeatable, mechanical, and durable. That is why the congressional backing mattered. Executive orders can be reversed, narrowed, ignored, or tied up in court. A legislative scaffold is a different proposition, one that can lock in the terms of a rollback and give it a longer life. In theory, that can make government more efficient. In practice, it can also produce rushed statutes, vague instructions, and implementation plans that rely more on ideology than on details. Agencies are then left to interpret how far the changes should go, regulated industries are left unsure what rules will survive, and the courts are left to settle the resulting disputes. The White House may have liked the optics of speed, but speed without deliberation in government often translates into confusion, delay, and litigation rather than clarity.

That broader deregulatory impulse was also visible elsewhere in the administration’s early moves. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for example, rescinded 24 guidance documents around the same time, reinforcing the sense that the new administration was not simply trying to prune a few regulations at the margins but to reset the relationship between Washington and the institutions that interpret and enforce federal policy. Taken together, these steps pointed to a government eager to show that it would not just complain about the administrative state, but actively destabilize it. Supporters could reasonably argue that some federal rules are outdated, duplicative, or badly designed, and few serious observers would deny that regulatory systems can become clumsy over time. But there is a difference between trimming waste and treating the whole structure as a target. The Trump White House seemed to prefer the politics of demolition because demolition is easier to announce than reform is to carry out. It makes for a clean story line: tear something down, call it freedom, and let the consequences sort themselves out later. What is harder to defend is the idea that a federal system can be governed sustainably through constant confrontation, with each agency treated as an enemy and each rule regarded as a wound waiting to be reopened. On February 28, the administration again showed that it was far more comfortable with the drama of destruction than with the slower, less theatrical work of deciding which rules deserved to survive and why.