This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 16th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Reorganizing the executive branch to eliminate wasteful regulation

may be a bit like reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

It doesn't change the trajectory.

If the President and Congress want to alter the regulatory landscape, that means repealing

statutes.

Peter Van Doren, editor of Regulation magazine, explains.

President Trump released an executive order on, quote,

a comprehensive plan for reorganizing the executive branch.

Having looked at this, what does that broadly mean to you?

I'm not sure.

I think there's a tendency for Republicans and for the American right to

obsess about agencies and assess about

eliminating agencies and rhetoric of that nature.

And the previous discussions you and I have had, I've pushed back a little against that by saying,

if we look back at the history of what's usually called deregulation, it's amazing to realize

how it was focused on statutes.

So if you didn't like what the government was doing, you didn't focus on the out of control

Department of Education or the out of control environmental protection agency.

Instead you said, you wrote your congressman and you said, I want to change the law or eliminate the law.

So in airline deregulation and trucking deregulation and all the deregulations of my early adulthood, we rewrote the

...