Full Title: Flawed Foundations: Identifying Errors in Regulatory Analysis for Deregulatory Actions
Author(s): Dena Adler, Bridget Pals, Kate Welty
Publisher(s): Institute for Policy Integrity
Publication Date: December 7, 2025
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
As the Trump Administration moves to rapidly advance its deregulatory agenda, federal agencies are increasingly cutting corners on regulatory analysis. When an agency issues rapid-fire regulations without proper analysis, justification, or opportunity for public comment, it violates its legal responsibility to conduct reasoned decisionmaking and other procedural requirements. This report summarizes some of the key analytical and legal requirements for proper regulatory analysis and agency decisionmaking, with particular consideration of how these requirements function in the context of regulatory repeals.
Because following best analytical practice is intrinsically intertwined with legal requirements for sound decisionmaking, an agency’s failure to show its work, use even-handed assumptions, or fully consider all important effects of a rule makes for substandard rules that are vulnerable to legal challenge. These requirements apply in full force when an agency engages in deregulatory actions such as amending, suspending, repealing, or delaying an existing rule. Specifically, we note:
- An agency must consider both the costs and benefits of a repeal, including the forgone benefits of the initial rule.
- An agency must consider all important effects, including indirect effects.
- An agency must not ignore important effects because of uncertainty.
- An agency must consider important non-monetized or unquantified effects.
- An agency must include the original rule being repealed or delayed in its baseline analysis and include significant changes since the original rule’s analysis.
- An agency must avoid unexplained inconsistencies in its analysis and reasoning.
- An agency must not revert to discredited models, outdated economic practices, disproved assumptions, or stale data.
- An agency must not treat transfers as a cost or benefit for society.
- An agency must show its work in both its proposed and final rules.
- An agency must consider the effects of alternatives to a full repeal.