As President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office approaches, Public Citizen is leading the fight against his administration’s deregulatory efforts in the courtroom, in the media, and on Capitol Hill.
“Make no mistake: Trump’s deregulatory blitz from DOGE’s mass firings to dismantle entire agencies to gutting enforcement against corporate criminals will mean more preventable injuries and illnesses, more needless deaths, more consumer scams and ripoffs, more industrial disasters,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. “These moves are about as inefficient as you could get. On the other hand, they will help boost CEOs’ compensation packages and further skyrocket corporations’ record profits.”
Here are some of the major ways the Trump administration has waged an assault on regulations – and how Public Citizen is fighting back.
Executive Orders
President Trump’s executive orders on deregulation have made clear his intent: to undertake one of the most radical and extreme attacks on public protections that our country has ever seen, all to the benefit of the wealthiest corporations.
On Day One of his administration, Trump rescinded President Biden’s EO 14094 on “Modernizing Regulatory Review,” which reformed the rulemaking process to work in the public interest instead of for corporate special interests. Trump also issued a one-in-ten-out order on regulation. And most recently, he issued an order that directs agencies to repeal rules that are purportedly out of compliance with various Supreme Court decisions, without using the notice-and-comment rulemaking that is required by law.
Right from the start, Public Citizen opposed Trump’s dangerous deregulatory blitz, calling the one-in-ten-out EO a stupid, corrupt, illegal Big Business giveaway, and blasted the early EO on rolling back regulations. Meanwhile, Public Citizen is leading the pushback against the EO on Supreme Court decisions.
OMB and OIRA Leadership
Trump’s picks to implement his deregulatory agenda are mostly partisan ideologues who will stop at nothing to impose their extreme anti-government agenda, even if it means running roughshod over constitutional limits and checks and balances
Trump nominated Russell Vought, staunch deregulation advocate and one of the architects of Project 2025, to head the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Vought’s Project 2025 blueprint included policy recommendations that were so extreme and toxic that even President Trump disavowed them on the campaign trail.
Public Citizen lobbied against and called on the Senate to reject Vought’s nomination. As co-chair of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, Public Citizen helped build the case against him. And as a result, no Democrats voted to confirm him.
In addition, Public Citizen spoke out against Trump’s nominee to lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Jeffrey Clark – a central figure in the conspiracy to deny and overturn the 2020 election, which resulted in him being formally disbarred. Public Citizen will monitor and hold OIRA accountable if Clark uses his position to further undermine regulations.
Congressional Review Act
Most everyday Americans have never heard of the Congressional Review Act (CRA). But you can be sure every well-connected corporate lobbyist knows what it is and exactly how it works. That’s because the point of the law is to give Congress a special shortcut to repeal regulations that protect the public, all to benefit specific corporations and industries that are lobbying against the rules.
The CRA allows Congress by a simple majority vote in both chambers with limited debate, no possibility of a filibuster, and the president’s signature to overturn recently issued regulations. The CRA includes a carryover period allowing a new Congress to strike down rules issued in the final months of the previous administration. But now Republicans in Congress have started using the CRA in unprecedented ways, targeting policies that are far beyond the law’s reach.
Public Citizen was the first organization to publicly confirm the August 16, 2024 start date for the CRA’s lookback period and first to project that the CRA’s carryover period would likely end in May. Public Citizen also produced one of the first trackers identifying likely CRA targets in the new Congress shortly after the election.
The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, co-chaired by Public Citizen, has been spearheading the effort to stop Congress from abusing the CRA to target rules that are beyond its reach. Both the Coalition and Public Citizen are tracking CRA resolutions as they are introduced – helping the public understand the harms of striking down these rules and which industries benefit.
Gutting Enforcement
The Trump administration isn’t just rolling back regulations; in many cases they’ve stopped enforcing the law against corporate wrongdoers. In other words, Trump has given corporate America the green light to break the law with impunity by taking agency cops off the beat. The Trump administration has already halted or moved to dismiss enforcement investigations and cases against more than 100 corporations, with more cases against accused corporate criminals being abandoned every week. Public Citizen’s tracker and reports have documented the massive dropoff in enforcement and connected the dots to which corporations, CEOs, and industries have benefited.
Attacks on Independent Agencies
Trump has come up with a new way to assault the regulatory system. For the first time in almost a century, the president has fired commissioners at multiple independent agencies, denying them quorums and the ability to perform core agency functions. This breathtaking power grab is a slap in the face to Congress, which deliberately designed these agencies to be independent of the president. Public Citizen is helping the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards track firings and the quorum status at independent agencies, and was part of a coalition letter condemning Trump’s attacks on these agencies. In addition, Public Citizen argued that Trump unlawfully fired the Federal Trade Commission’s two Democratic commissioners.
DOGE Dismantling Federal Agencies
Right-wing ideologues and activists have long dreamed of shutting down government agencies wholesale and firing government employees en masse. But this has always been a pipe dream, since Congress has never had the votes to shut down protective agencies that are popular with the public. Now, with the Trump Administration ignoring checks and balances and constitutional limits left and right, the moment has come.
The Trump administration has gutted essential federal agencies like USAID, the CFPB, the Departments of Education and Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency in the name of so-called “government efficiency.”
Public Citizen sued to stop the dismantling of both USAID and the CFPB, and called on the Office of Government Ethics to direct Elon Musk and his agents to desist from any activity related to the CFPB because of his spectacular conflicts of interest. Public Citizen also led the call for a congressional investigation into DOGE’s lawless takeover and sued to ensure DOGE complies with the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
More broadly, Public Citizen put forth an alternative vision for what a government committed to “efficiency” would prioritize instead of deregulation, dismantling agencies, and firing regulators en masse. The report examined the broad record of regulation and showed that major regulations generate overwhelmingly positive economic returns – disproving the notion that DOGE can find social savings through regulatory rollbacks.
Anti-Regulatory Legislation
Not to be outdone, Republicans in Congress have joined Trump’s deregulatory push by introducing and advancing a wide range of anti-regulatory bills. Public Citizen, as co-chair of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, helped analyze and lobby against these bills, which include the REINS Act, the Midnight Rules Relief Act, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, the GOOD Act, and the Reorganizing Government Act, among others. Public Citizen remains committed to ensuring these dangerous bills never become law.
