Empower Wisconsin | Jan. 9, 2020

The Federal Register, the daily journal of federal activity (much of it regulatory in nature), surpassed 70,000 pages in 2019, according to Ballotpedia. 

That’s an increase of more than 4,300 pages from 2018, but it pales in comparison to the Obama years. The Federal Register hit an all-time high of 95,894 pages in 2016, the last year of President Obama’s tenure in office, according to Ballotpedia.  

Ballotpedia maintains page counts and other information about the Federal Register as part of its Administrative State Project.

President Trump has made trimming federal rules and regulations a key part of his administration. Upon taking office, he issued Executive Order 13,771, requiring among other things, that federal agencies identify two regulations to cut for each new one to be added.

While, overall, the actions haven’t brought significant reductions to the 1.079 million regulatory restrictions that were on the books when Trump took office, “it’s rare to see a code fail to grow across an entire presidential term,” James Broughel, senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, recently argued in The Hill.