The Claim

Slashed job-killing regulations to unleash innovation, lower costs, and put American workers first.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

Three things: (1) the administration cut regulations, (2) those regulations were “job-killing,” and (3) cutting them unleashed innovation, lowered costs, and benefited American workers. The claim packages deregulation as a three-part economic triumph — more jobs, more innovation, lower prices.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That regulations, by their nature, kill jobs. That removing regulations creates jobs. That there is a direct causal link between the administration’s deregulatory actions and observable improvements in innovation, costs, and worker welfare. That the regulations cut were specifically the ones harming workers and consumers, not the ones protecting them. That the benefits of deregulation flow to ordinary Americans rather than to regulated industries.

What is conspicuously absent?

Every piece of context that would complicate this narrative. That academic research — including the definitive Penn Press volume “Does Regulation Kill Jobs?” (Coglianese, Finkel, Carrigan, 2013) — concludes regulations have minimal net employment effects, primarily shifting jobs between sectors rather than creating or destroying them. That the manufacturing sector lost 108,000 jobs during the administration’s first year. That consumer prices rose 2.7% in 2025, with hospital costs up 6.7%, electricity up 6.7%, and food up 3.1%. That the administration simultaneously slashed federal R&D funding by a third and proposed cutting the National Science Foundation by nearly 60% — the opposite of “unleashing innovation.” That NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimates $152.9 billion in annual net public benefits at risk from the rollbacks, including 3,299 premature deaths and 7,461 new childhood asthma cases per year. That the specific regulations cut include heat protections for 36 million workers, chemical disaster safety rules, pesticide exposure protections for farmworkers, and nursing home staffing standards. That this claim substantially overlaps with item #90 (“largest deregulation initiative… delivering $5 trillion in savings”) and item #234 (“killed federal regulations at an astonishing 129-to-one rate”).

Padding Analysis: Deregulation Trilogy

This item is part of a three-item cluster covering identical deregulatory actions from slightly different angles:

• Item #90: “Launched the largest deregulation initiative in U.S. history, delivering $5 trillion in savings” — the headline claim, under “Rebuilding an Economy.”
• Item #233 (this item): “Slashed job-killing regulations to unleash innovation, lower costs, and put American workers first” — the rhetorical framing, under “Making Government Work.”
• Item #234: “Killed federal regulations at an astonishing 129-to-one rate” — the metric, under “Making Government Work.”

All three items describe the same executive actions (EO 14192, the 10-to-1 mandate, and the resulting 646 deregulatory actions in FY2025). This item adds no factual content beyond item #90; it merely reframes the deregulatory agenda through the “job-killing regulations” and “innovation” rhetoric. It is not flagged as padding because it introduces distinct testable claims — that the regulations were specifically job-killing, that innovation was unleashed, that costs were lowered, and that workers benefited — all of which can be independently evaluated.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

The administration pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda in 2025, with OIRA reporting 646 deregulatory actions versus 5 regulatory actions. Executive Order 14192, signed January 31, 2025, directed agencies to identify at least 10 existing regulations for repeal when proposing any new regulation. OIRA’s end-of-year report claimed a 129-to-1 ratio and $211.8 billion in net cost savings. However, the American Action Forum — a center-right organization sympathetic to deregulation — found that excluding two large rules (Beneficial Ownership Information reporting repeal at $84 billion and nursing home staffing standards repeal at $55.1 billion), all other 2025 regulatory actions produced a net cost of approximately $9.4 billion. The Competitive Enterprise Institute noted that three rules alone accounted for over 80% of the claimed $212 billion in savings. ¹

Academic research finds that regulations have minimal net employment effects. The Penn Press volume “Does Regulation Kill Jobs?” (2013), edited by Cary Coglianese (Penn Law), Adam Finkel, and Christopher Carrigan, assembled leading economists, political scientists, and policy analysts who concluded that “regulation overall is neither a prime job killer nor a key job creator.” ProPublica’s review of the literature found the same consensus: Richard Morgenstern (Resources for the Future) stated “the effects on jobs are negligible — they’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average”; Roger Noll (Stanford) said “regulation affects the distribution of jobs among industries, but not the total number.” A Legal Planet analysis found that manufacturing employment was 12.3 million at end of 2016 (post-Obama regulation), 12.8 million at end of 2019 (post-Trump deregulation), and nearly 13 million at end of 2023 (post-Biden regulation) — suggesting deregulation produced negligible employment gains while re-regulation did not prevent job growth. ²

The manufacturing sector lost 108,000 jobs during Trump’s first year back in office. The Joint Economic Committee (minority) reported in February 2026 that manufacturing employment fell by 108,000 in 2025 — exceeding earlier BLS estimates of 68,000. Since the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April 2025, 37,000 manufacturing jobs were lost and manufacturing hiring dropped to its lowest level in nearly a decade. The Center for American Progress found that overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 from January to September 2025. Blue-collar industries lost nearly 166,000 jobs from February 2025 to January 2026. ³

Consumer prices rose 2.7% in 2025 — they did not fall. The BLS Consumer Price Index shows the all-items CPI increased 2.7% from December 2024 to December 2025. Within that: food prices rose 3.1% (food away from home up 4.1%), energy costs rose 2.3% (electricity up 6.7%, piped gas up 10.8%), hospital costs rose 6.7% (the largest increase since 2010), and medical care overall rose 3.2%. The tariff effect pushed prices higher: household appliances rose 5.6%, fruit 5.5%, and meat 6.2% above pre-tariff trends. While headline inflation was declining from the 2022 peak, prices did not “lower” — they continued to rise, just more slowly. ⁴

NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimates $152.9 billion in annual net benefits at risk from the administration’s regulatory rollbacks, including 3,299 premature deaths per year. The tracker (updated February 13, 2026) uses the government’s own regulatory impact analyses to quantify foregone benefits: $118.7 billion in climate benefits at risk, $16.6 billion in consumer savings at risk, $21.7 billion in monetized health benefits at risk, 7,461 new child asthma cases, and 3,922 hospital/ER admissions annually. The top rollback by dollar value is the repeal of light- and medium-duty vehicle GHG standards ($98.9 billion in net benefits at risk). ⁵

Strong Inferences

The specific regulations cut disproportionately affected the workers the claim promises to “put first.” The Economic Policy Institute documented that the administration’s deregulatory agenda targeted dozens of rules protecting workers’ health, safety, and pay. OSHA proposed over 20 rule changes on July 1, 2025, including weakening respiratory protection standards, limiting General Duty Clause enforcement for high-risk work, removing minimum illumination requirements for construction sites, and withdrawing musculoskeletal disorder tracking. The heat protection rule — which would have shielded 36 million workers from heat-related illness — was stalled. The EPA proposed weakening pesticide exposure protections for farmworkers and rolled back chemical disaster safety rules covering nearly 12,000 facilities. The long-term care staffing standards repeal — one of the two rules accounting for most of the claimed “savings” — eliminated minimum nurse staffing requirements in nursing homes. ⁶

The administration’s own actions undermine the “unleash innovation” claim. The proposed FY2026 budget slashes basic research funding by a third, with the National Science Foundation facing a cut of nearly 60%. The American Enterprise Institute — not a left-leaning organization — published “Trump’s Discordant Innovation Agenda: Deregulation Without Discovery” (July 2025), arguing that “deregulation is not a substitute for discovery” and that the R&D cuts undermine the foundation on which future innovation depends. Federal Reserve research shows government R&D spending accounts for approximately a quarter of postwar productivity growth. The Progressive Policy Institute noted that federal non-defense R&D yields 140-210% economic returns per dollar invested, and that the NIH’s Human Genome Project generated $178 for every $1 spent. Cutting the research pipeline while claiming to “unleash innovation” is a contradiction. ⁷

The 646 “deregulatory actions” count inflates the scale of actual regulatory change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute — ideologically sympathetic to deregulation — noted that the 129-to-1 ratio includes minor actions like the “shoes-off” policy change at airport security checkpoints. When the government’s own Unified Regulatory Agenda is examined, comparing all final regulatory actions to those classified as deregulatory, the ratio is closer to 3-to-1 regulatory actions for every deregulatory one — the inverse of the claimed ratio. Only 218 of the 646 actions actually deleted, modified, or otherwise changed the Code of Federal Regulations. ⁸

What the Evidence Shows

This claim rests on three pillars — job creation, innovation, and lower costs — and the evidence collapses each one.

Start with “job-killing regulations.” The phrase itself is a political construction, not an economic finding. Decades of academic research, synthesized in the definitive Coglianese/Finkel/Carrigan volume at Penn, finds that regulations have negligible net employment effects. They shift jobs between sectors — pollution creates cleanup jobs; safety rules create compliance jobs — but the net effect is near zero. The empirical record confirms this: manufacturing employment was higher after four years of Biden-era regulation than after Trump’s first-term deregulation. Meanwhile, during this very year of record deregulation, the manufacturing sector lost 108,000 jobs, workers without college degrees lost 361,000 jobs, and blue-collar industries shed 166,000 positions. The job losses were driven by tariffs, not regulations — but the deregulation did nothing to prevent them, either. The promise to “put American workers first” coincided with the stalling of heat protections for 36 million workers, the weakening of construction site lighting standards, and the repeal of nursing home staffing minimums. These are the workers the regulations were designed to protect.

On innovation: the administration’s claim is directly contradicted by its own budget. You cannot “unleash innovation” while cutting basic research funding by a third and proposing to gut the National Science Foundation by 60%. Even AEI — an organization that shares the administration’s enthusiasm for deregulation — called this out as “deregulation without discovery.” Federal R&D spending accounts for about a quarter of postwar productivity growth. The innovations that drive economic growth — GPS, the internet, mRNA vaccines — emerged from government-funded basic research. Deregulation may remove barriers to deploying existing technology, but it does not generate new knowledge. The administration is cutting the pipeline while claiming credit for the flow.

On lower costs: consumer prices rose 2.7% in 2025. Hospital costs rose 6.7%. Electricity rose 6.7%. Food rose 3.1%. None of these categories showed declines attributable to deregulation. The only “costs” that fell were compliance costs for regulated industries — which is real money for those industries, but it is not the same as lower prices for consumers. When the EPA repealed vehicle emission standards, it counted $1.3 trillion in avoided industry compliance costs as “savings” while ignoring the fuel savings and health benefits consumers would lose. The savings go to industry; the costs go to the public.

The Bottom Line

Steel-man first: the administration did pursue a historically aggressive deregulatory program in 2025. EO 14192 set an ambitious framework, agencies completed hundreds of actions, and some regulations genuinely deserved review. Regulatory reform is a legitimate policy goal, and some of the actions — like nuclear energy regulatory modernization — have broad expert support.

But every substantive element of this claim is either unsupported or contradicted by evidence. “Job-killing regulations” is a political slogan, not an empirical finding; the academic consensus is that regulation has negligible net employment effects. “Unleash innovation” is contradicted by the administration’s own budget, which slashes the basic research funding that generates innovation. “Lower costs” is contradicted by the BLS, which shows consumer prices continuing to rise across nearly every category. And “put American workers first” is contradicted by the specific regulations cut — heat protections, safety standards, pesticide rules, nursing home staffing — which overwhelmingly protected workers, not burdened them. The claim takes an aggressive industry-favoring deregulatory program and dresses it in populist language that inverts the actual distribution of benefits and costs. The regulated industries benefit; American workers bear the consequences.

Footnotes

1. OIRA, “End of Year Deregulatory Stats: Showing the Trump Administration Has Best Deregulation Year in History” (2025-12). https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/12/32750/. EO 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation” (2025-01-31). American Action Forum, “2025: The Year in Regulation” (2026-01-15). https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/2025-the-year-in-regulation/. Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Trump’s Deregulation Meets Invisible Rulemaking” (2026). https://cei.org/blog/trumps-deregulation-meets-invisible-rulemaking-the-real-2026-challenge/ ↩

2. Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, Christopher Carrigan, eds., “Does Regulation Kill Jobs?” (Penn Press, 2013). https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2628/. ProPublica, “Do Regulations Really Kill Jobs Overall? Not So Much.” https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-the-evidence-that-regulations-kill-jobs. Legal Planet, “The Zombie Myth of Job-Killing Regulations” (2024-08-30). https://legal-planet.org/2024/08/30/the-zombie-myth-of-job-killing-regulations/ ↩

3. Joint Economic Committee (Minority), “During Trump’s First Year, the Manufacturing Industry Lost 108,000 Jobs” (2026-02-11). https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/press-releases?ID=D62C637F-212C-44AA-B7C4-7E49A3FFCE49. Center for American Progress, “Year 1 of the Second Trump Administration Made the Working Class Weaker” (2026-01). https://www.americanprogress.org/article/year-1-of-the-second-trump-administration-made-the-working-class-weaker/ ↩

4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index: 2025 in Review” (2026). https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/consumer-price-index-2025-in-review.htm. BLS CPI Summary, February 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm ↩

5. Institute for Policy Integrity, NYU School of Law, “Tracking the Damages of Regulatory Rollbacks” (updated 2026-02-13). https://policyintegrity.org/tracking-regulatory-rollbacks ↩

6. Economic Policy Institute, “Workers’ health, safety, and pay are among the casualties of Trump’s war on regulations: A deregulation year in review” (2026-01). https://www.epi.org/publication/deregulation-year-in-review/. EPI, “Trump’s crusade against health and safety regulations endangers workers” (2025). https://www.epi.org/blog/trumps-crusade-against-health-and-safety-regulations-endangers-workers-hobbles-the-environmental-justice-movement-and-sets-the-stage-for-our-next-public-health-crisis/ ↩

7. American Enterprise Institute, “Trump’s Discordant Innovation Agenda: Deregulation Without Discovery” (2025-07-14). https://www.aei.org/economics/trumps-divided-innovation-agenda-deregulation-without-discovery/. Progressive Policy Institute, “Trump Cuts to R&D Jeopardize Innovation” (2025). https://www.progressivepolicy.org/trump-cuts-to-rd-jeopardize-innovation/ ↩

8. Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Trump’s Deregulation Meets Invisible Rulemaking: The Real 2026 Challenge” (2026). https://cei.org/blog/trumps-deregulation-meets-invisible-rulemaking-the-real-2026-challenge/. OIRA, Regulatory Reform Results for Fiscal Year 2025. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaEO14192 ↩