The Claim

Directed the Office of the Federal Register to speed up publishing time and decrease costs, enabling agencies to more quickly and effectively restore freedom through President Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

That the president issued a directive to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) to reduce the time it takes to publish documents and lower publication costs. This is accurate — Executive Order 14295, “Increasing Efficiency at the Office of the Federal Register,” was signed May 9, 2025.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That OFR publication delays were a meaningful bottleneck to deregulation. That “restoring freedom” is an objective, neutral description of what deregulation accomplishes. That faster Federal Register publishing is a significant presidential accomplishment worthy of a slot on a “365 wins” list. That the costs being reduced are substantial enough to matter. The phrase “restore freedom” reframes a procedural tweak as a civil liberties triumph.

What is conspicuously absent?

That the Federal Register’s typical turnaround is already 3-5 business days — not the weeks the White House implies. That the OFR’s processing time serves a real purpose: formatting, date calculation, editorial verification, and CFR citation checking that ensure legal accuracy of binding federal documents. That publication fees of $151-$174 per column have been stable since 2018 and are charged by the Government Publishing Office (GPO), not the OFR. That the real bottleneck in regulatory and deregulatory action is not Federal Register publishing speed but the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment requirements — which the administration is simultaneously working to bypass through separate directives. That this executive order is one of at least five deregulation-adjacent items on the “365 wins” list (items 90, 233, 234, 244, 279), all describing facets of the same underlying deregulatory agenda. That the EO’s reporting requirements (15-day and 105-day reports to OMB) suggest this is an internal process matter, not a transformative policy.

Padding Analysis: The Deregulation Cluster Expands

This item is the fifth entry in a cluster of claims about the administration’s deregulatory agenda:

• Item #90: “Launched the largest deregulation initiative in U.S. history, delivering $5 trillion in savings” — the headline claim.
• Item #233: “Slashed job-killing regulations to unleash innovation, lower costs, and put American workers first” — the rhetorical framing.
• Item #234: “Killed federal regulations at an astonishing 129-to-one rate” — the metric.
• Item #244: “Directed the administration to take all necessary steps to defend Americans’ constitutional rights from overreach” — the constitutional framing.
• Item #279 (this item): “Directed the Office of the Federal Register to speed up publishing time” — the procedural support.

While items 90, 233, and 234 describe the substance of the deregulatory program, this item describes an administrative process tweak in the publication pipeline. It is not flagged as formal padding because it involves a distinct executive order (EO 14295) with its own policy content. But it is padding in spirit — dressing up a minor process directive as a standalone presidential accomplishment to add another entry to the deregulatory cluster.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

Executive Order 14295, “Increasing Efficiency at the Office of the Federal Register,” was signed May 9, 2025. The order directs the Archivist of the United States, acting through the OFR, to work with the Director of the Government Publishing Office to “reduce publication delays to the greatest extent feasible, including by modernizing computer systems and eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy.” It requires a 15-day report on average publication times by document category, a 45-day review of fee schedules to ensure fees reflect “actual costs of publication,” and a follow-up report by August 22, 2025 comparing publication times from July 15 to August 15, 2025. The order states that agencies are charged “$151-$174 per column of text” for publication. ¹

The Federal Register’s standard turnaround is already 3-5 business days. According to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual and the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Register publishing handbook, OFR typically publishes documents within 3-5 business days of receipt, with 3 days being common for documents received by 2 p.m. The White House fact sheet’s characterization that OFR takes “days or even weeks” obscures this reality — “days” is the normal, expected turnaround for a process that involves formatting, editorial review, date calculation, and CFR citation verification. Extended timelines (“weeks”) occur during high-volume periods, not as a baseline. ²

Publication fees of $151-$174 per column have been stable since May 2018 and represent a GPO cost, not an OFR inefficiency. GPO Circular Letter No. 1003, issued March 28, 2018, set the current rates: $453/page ($151/column) for Microsoft Word submissions and $522/page ($174/column) for manuscript or camera-ready copy. The Word rate was actually reduced in 2018 from $477/page ($159/column), reflecting “technology efficiencies that GPO has introduced in their production processes.” The fees are charged by GPO, not OFR, to cover typesetting, formatting, and printing costs. They are not “waste” — they fund the production of the legally authoritative daily journal of the United States government. ³

The OFR’s processing time serves substantive functions beyond mere delay. The OFR reviews submitted documents for proper formatting, calculates and inserts effective dates and comment period deadlines, verifies CFR citations and amendatory instructions, coordinates with GPO for typesetting and production, and places documents on public inspection before publication. These steps ensure that the documents published in the Federal Register — which carry the force of law — are accurate, properly formatted, and legally valid. The OFR is not a rubber stamp; it is the quality-assurance step between agency drafting and legal publication. ⁴

The executive order is part of a broader strategy to accelerate deregulation by removing procedural checks. The May 2025 OFR order followed EO 14192 (January 31, 2025) mandating 10-for-1 deregulation, the April 9, 2025 presidential memorandum directing agencies to repeal “unlawful” regulations without notice-and-comment using the APA’s “good cause” exception, and preceded OIRA Memo M-25-36 (October 21, 2025), which cut OIRA review from 90 days to 28 days for deregulatory actions and 14 days for “facially unlawful” rules. The pattern is consistent: compress every step of the regulatory process to speed deregulation. ⁵

Strong Inferences

The real bottleneck to deregulation is not Federal Register publishing time but Administrative Procedure Act requirements. The APA requires notice-and-comment rulemaking for most regulatory actions, including repeals. This typically takes months or years, not days. A 3-to-5-day OFR turnaround is negligible relative to the months required for notice-and-comment periods (typically 30-90 days minimum), agency response to comments, and OIRA review. The administration’s own actions confirm this — the April 2025 memo directing agencies to use “good cause” exceptions to bypass notice-and-comment entirely, and the October 2025 OIRA memo slashing review times, both address the actual procedural bottlenecks. Shaving a day or two off Federal Register publication time does not meaningfully accelerate deregulation. ⁶

Legal scholars have warned that the broader strategy of compressing regulatory timelines — of which this EO is one small piece — will produce deregulatory actions that fail in court. Richard Pierce of George Washington University Law School argued that “every action taken by any agency to implement these orders is subject to judicial review” and that the first Trump administration’s 22% court win rate for deregulatory actions resulted largely from inadequate process. Roger Nober of GWU’s Regulatory Studies Center called the good-cause bypass approach “untested and untried.” Arnold & Porter’s analysis of OIRA Memo M-25-36 noted that “circumventing standard notice-and-comment procedures could expose agencies to Administrative Procedure Act challenges.” Faster publishing does not fix the fundamental legal vulnerability: deregulatory actions that skip required procedures get overturned. ⁷

The “restore freedom” language embeds a contestable ideological claim into what is otherwise a process directive. The executive order’s stated purpose is to remove delays “inhibit[ing] the Administration’s deregulatory agenda.” This is a procedural goal. The “365 wins” list repackages it as “enabling agencies to more quickly and effectively restore freedom” — language that presupposes deregulation equals freedom. Whether deregulation restores freedom depends entirely on whose freedom is being measured: the freedom of regulated industries from compliance costs, or the freedom of workers from workplace hazards, consumers from unsafe products, and communities from environmental contamination. As documented in items 233 and 234, the specific regulations being repealed include heat protections for 36 million workers, nursing home staffing standards, pesticide exposure rules, and chemical disaster safety requirements. ⁸

What the Evidence Shows

Executive Order 14295 is a real directive that was actually signed. It addresses a real, if modest, target: Federal Register publishing speed and costs. In that narrow sense, the claim is true. The president did direct the OFR to speed up and cut costs.

But the claim’s significance is wildly inflated. The Federal Register already publishes most documents within 3-5 business days. Publication fees have been stable since 2018 and represent actual production costs. The OFR’s processing time exists to ensure legal accuracy of binding federal documents — it is not bureaucratic waste. And even if you eliminated the OFR’s processing time entirely, it would have negligible impact on the pace of deregulation, because the real bottleneck is the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment requirements, which take months, not the Federal Register’s publishing queue, which takes days.

The claim’s real function is list inflation. It takes an internal process directive — the kind of housekeeping order that every administration issues without fanfare — and frames it as a presidential accomplishment advancing “freedom.” The rhetorical packaging is doing all the work: “restore freedom through President Trump’s deregulatory agenda” is ideological narration layered onto a mundane administrative order about publication schedules and fee reviews. If directing the Federal Register to review its fee schedule qualifies as one of 365 “wins,” the bar for a “win” has been set at approximately ankle height.

This item also extends the deregulation cluster to five entries (items 90, 233, 234, 244, 279), all describing aspects of the same underlying program. The substantive deregulatory actions are already covered by items 90, 233, and 234. This item adds only a procedural footnote, yet it occupies the same list space as genuinely distinct policy actions.

The Bottom Line

Steel-man first: administrative modernization is a legitimate goal. If the Federal Register’s publishing systems are outdated and its fee schedules don’t reflect current production costs, an executive order directing review and improvement is reasonable governance. Every administration has an interest in efficient publication of federal documents. The order’s reporting requirements (publication time benchmarks, fee audits) are sensible management tools.

But the claim takes this routine administrative directive and inflates it into a presidential victory for freedom. The OFR’s typical 3-5 day turnaround is not a meaningful barrier to deregulation. The fees are set by GPO, have been stable since 2018, and cover real production costs. The processing time serves real functions — formatting, date calculation, citation verification — that ensure the legal accuracy of the nation’s regulatory record. And the “freedom” language obscures what deregulation actually does to the specific workers and communities affected by the regulations being repealed. This is an unremarkable process improvement directive dressed up as a pillar of the deregulatory agenda. It is true in its narrow factual claim and misleading in everything it implies about significance.

Footnotes

1. Executive Order 14295, “Increasing Efficiency at the Office of the Federal Register,” May 9, 2025. White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/increasing-efficiency-at-the-office-of-the-federal-register/. Federal Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/14/2025-08682/increasing-efficiency-at-the-office-of-the-federal-register. Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Executive_Order:_Increasing_Efficiency_at_the_Office_of_the_Federal_Register_(Donald_Trump,_2025). ↩

2. State Department Foreign Affairs Manual, 18 FAM 201.6, “Publication in the Federal Register”: https://fam.state.gov/fam/18fam/18fam020106.html. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Handbook on Publishing Documents in the Federal Register”: https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/policy/files/PublishingFRDocs.pdf. Federal Register, “When Is This Document Going to Publish?” (OFR announcement, 2015): https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/office-of-the-federal-register-announcements/2015/02/when-is-this-document-going-to-publish. ↩

3. GPO Circular Letter No. 1003, “New Federal Register Publishing Rates,” March 28, 2018: https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/circular-letters/new-federal-register-publishing-rates. ↩

4. Federal Register, “About This Site” (Government Policy and OFR Procedures): https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/government-policy-and-ofr-procedures/about-this-site. National Archives, “Frequently Asked Questions for OFR”: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/faqs. Office of the Federal Register, “A Guide to the Rulemaking Process” (2011): https://uploads.federalregister.gov/uploads/2013/09/The-Rulemaking-Process.pdf. ↩

5. Executive Order 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” January 31, 2025: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/06/2025-02345/unleashing-prosperity-through-deregulation. Presidential Memorandum, “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations,” April 9, 2025: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/04/trump-directive-aims-speed-deregulation-nixing-public-input/404474/. OIRA Memo M-25-36, “Streamlining the Review of Deregulatory Actions,” October 21, 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/M-25-36-Streamlining-the-Review-of-Deregulatory-Actions.pdf. ↩

6. Administrative Conference of the United States, “Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking” (procedures overview): https://www.acus.gov/sites/default/files/documents/IIB014-Rulemaking.pdf. Arnold & Porter, “New OMB Memorandum Signals Push to Accelerate Deregulatory Actions,” November 4, 2025: https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/blogs/environmental-edge/2025/11/new-omb-memorandum-signals-push-to-accelerate-deregulatory-actions. ↩

7. Richard J. Pierce Jr., “President Trump’s Deregulation Initiatives Are Exercises in Futility,” The Regulatory Review, June 10, 2025: https://www.theregreview.org/2025/06/10/pierce-president-trumps-deregulation-initiatives-are-exercises-in-futility/. Government Executive, “Trump directive aims to speed up deregulation by nixing public input,” April 2025: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/04/trump-directive-aims-speed-deregulation-nixing-public-input/404474/. Arnold & Porter (November 2025, cited above). ↩

8. White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Increases Efficiency at the Federal Register,” May 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-increases-efficiency-at-the-federal-register/. For the specific regulations at risk, see analysis of items 233 and 234 and NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, “Tracking the Damages of Regulatory Rollbacks”: https://policyintegrity.org/tracking-regulatory-rollbacks. ↩