As part of an effort to bring more information about the regulatory and legal environment facing American manufacturers, NFPA is monitoring the newsfeed of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and will be bringing important updates like this to the attention of NFPA members.
(February 21, 2025) President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order beginning the process of reviewing past regulations for revision or elimination.
What’s going on: The order, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative,” directs federal agencies to identify for the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administration within 60 days any past rules that:
- Raise “serious constitutional difficulties, such as exceeding the scope of the power vested in the federal government by the Constitution.”
- Are “based on unlawful delegation of legislative power.”
- “[H]arm the national interest by significantly and unjustifiably impeding technological innovation, infrastructure development, disaster response, inflation reduction, research and development, economic development, energy production, land use, and foreign policy objectives.”
- Impose on private parties significant costs “not outweighed by public benefits.”
- Place “undue burdens on small business and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship.”
Its aim: The executive order “[f]ocuses on rules lacking clear statutory authority, imposing considerable costs, or hindering innovation and economic development,” according to law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
What it authorizes: It also gives agency heads the discretion to end enforcement proceedings they believe to be noncompliant with the law or the Trump administration’s authority.
The NAM’s actions: The EO aligns with recommendations that the NAM and more than 100 other manufacturing associations made to President Trump in December regarding the need to address the regulatory onslaught.
The NAM-led group called for a “regulatory reset” to “stop the trend of overreaching regulations that seek to expand agencies’ authority.”
“You have the opportunity to tackle this challenge [of overregulation] by addressing burdensome regulations that are stifling investment, making us less competitive in the world, limiting innovation and threatening the very jobs we are all working to create right here in America,” the NAM-led coalition told the president. “Let’s get to work and make America’s manufacturing sector unstoppable.”