WASHINGTON — Just over nine months after President Trump signed an executive order mandating that each new regulation must be accompanied by suggestions for two regulations to eliminate, the head of one regulatory agency told the public that his agency can accomplish this in what might seem like a paradoxical manner — by creating more regulations.
“We actually deregulate by regulating,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said at a luncheon. He noted that this was not “some magical construct we’ve adopted … over the last six months” but rather that it was the agency’s normal way of doing business.
In fact, the Office of Management and Budget told agencies that kind of approach could be used to implement the order, in an April memorandum. While the executive order specified that regulations should be “identified for elimination,” the memorandum clarified that departments could comply with the executive order by instead creating more regulations whose savings offset other regulations’ costs.
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