This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 17th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How was the regulatory record of Donald Trump?

And what should we expect from Joe Biden and what has he done already?

Cato's Tom Firey is managing editor of Regulation magazine.

Will Yeatman is a research fellow in Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for

constitutional studies. We evaluate the Trump regulatory record, and

though it's early days, we learn what we should expect from the Biden administration.

What would you say, and I know there may be some disagreement here, which I'm happy to exploit for

conversational purposes, what was the regulatory record?

How positive, how strong from a libertarian perspective was the regulatory record of Donald

John Trump.

Trump administration's regulatory agenda in hindsight was a mixed bag. On the one hand, this much ballyhooed, two for one, you know, two regulations must be deleted from the Code of Federal Regulations for every new regulation promulgated.

That was the glitzy promise and there's been a great deal of ink spiddled about how there wasn't much to that promise and there couldn't

have been too much to that promise. I mean 85 90% of regulations are pursuant

to direct statutory commands.

There isn't much discretion.

There's only kind of a narrow band, and it's a very consequential band of policymaking,

but that is subject to this sort of management. So on the one hand, two for

one hokey stuff. On the other hand, the administration, and this was done surely unbeknownst to Mr. President Trump, but good people in the administration, smart people, people like Jeffrey Rosen, who is first the general counsel

at the Department of Transportation

and then was assistant attorney general,

...