Writing at the Washington Post, economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson considers the president’s track record on his deregulatory agenda and sees slower progress ahead. First, though, he notes several successes of deregulation:

In 2001, twenty-one-year-old Abigail Burroughs was dying of cancer. After all conventional treatment methods failed to improve her condition, Abigail’s oncologist pleaded with the Food and Drug Administration to allow her to try Erbitux. At the time, Erbitux had not fully passed the FDA’s drug approval process. Abigail was denied access and lost her…
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Improving housing affordability will significantly reduce homelessness, but it will not in itself solve the problem.

According to a recent study by the Pacific Legal Foundation, 2,094 out of the 2,952 regulations issued from 2001 until 2017 by the Department of Health and Human Services were unconstitutional.

Deregulation to answer housing shortage.

Right-to-try will never reach its potential without deregulation.

It’s amazing what good things can happen when the power and greed of bureaucrats and politicians over regular Americans is diminished!

Whatever his performance on regulations, the president has failed to eliminate any federal agencies, however useless they might be.

I first met Fred S. McChesney (1948–2017) at the Federal Trade Commission in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan had just been elected to the presidency and had appointed James C. Miller III as the FTC’s chairman. Robert D. Tollison had been confirmed as the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Economics. I am not…
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President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act on October 24, 1978. That law phased out the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) over the next four years, ending five decades of federal regulation of passenger airfares on interstate commercial flights and entry into the airline industry. One of prime movers behind this first legislative initiative…
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