Regulatory Rollback

DOGE has also been supporting the general Project 2025/conservative project of regulatory rollback. On Feb 19th, Trump signed an excutive order Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Deregulatory Initiative (yes, they all have titles like this) which declared that DOGE and the OMB should be involved in reviewing every agency’s regulations to revoke any that it deems unnecessary for the agency’s statutory duties. It also set the unrealistic standard that 10 regulations must be revoked at agencies before they can add a new one. DOGE’s work here has involved the following threads:

• Reviewing Regulations As mentioned before, DOGE staff have sometimes been heavily involved in scrutinizing regulations, specifically ones that are seen to be violating the administration’s rules against DEI and acknowledging the impact of climate change. The actual process of revoking regulations is not something that DOGE can just do quickly and unilaterally; it requires following the Administrative Procedure Act, so DOGE often has to act in an advisory role for that, but they are able to effect changes in other ways. For instance, by firing key staff that oversee the enforcement of regulations (for instance, the head of safety for medical devices at the FDA), cancelling contracts for software and services related to regulations or by scrubbing documentation and materials from agency websites. DOGE has also explored using AI to automate regulatory review, with Christopher Sweet doing this at HUD.
• Stop-Work and Snitch Lines If you can’t remove a regulation, you can always suspend enforcement. Early on, DOGE set the template for this tactic at the CFPB, with agency leadership ordering that all staff must leave the agency headquarters and everybody must be on indefinite administrative leave with no work allowed unless it is explicitly authorized. To further underscore this, they even set up a special “snitch line” email address for the public to report if agency staff were still working.
• Muzzling Agencies This intimidation was meant to not only feed individual agencies like USAID “into the wood chipper.” It was also meant to intimidate other agencies into premature compliance, under the totalitarian theory that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. To further this point, multiple teams of Wreckers have been dispatched under the direction of Nate Cavanaugh to target independent regulatory agencies in the hopes of stopping their enforcement and collecting sensitive data on whistleblowers.