10-to-1 Deregulation? Bold Strategy, Cotton. Let’s See If It Pays Off

President Trump’s latest Executive Order, Massive 10-to-1 Deregulation Initiative, on deregulation doesn’t just take a hacksaw to federal oversight—it demands a full-scale demolition, complete with pyrotechnics and a ceremonial ribbon-cutting at the site of the regulatory wreckage. The mandate? For every new regulation, at least ten existing rules must be repealed. Because who needs nuanced policy when you can just feed government oversight into a paper shredder and call it economic reform?

The idea of trimming regulations isn’t inherently bad. Many small businesses struggle with compliance costs and bureaucratic inertia. But instead of a thoughtful, surgical approach, this executive order takes a chainsaw to the whole system and then wonders why everything is on fire. It treats governance like a yard sale: everything must go, and if you act now, you can deregulate an entire industry for the low, low price of common sense.

Not all regulations are created equal. Some are archaic, drafted in a time when the biggest corporate threat was a guy selling snake oil out of a wagon. Those deserve reconsideration. But other regulations serve as society’s seat belts, preventing financial collapses, environmental disasters, and corporations from treating workers like medieval serfs. When policy demands a ten-for-one repeal ratio, it sacrifices safety measures along with the dead weight, ensuring we all get a front-row seat to the consequences.

Deregulation can be beneficial in theory. Reducing bureaucratic red tape can create opportunities for businesses to expand, encourage innovation, and cut unnecessary compliance costs. But when deregulation becomes a numerical stunt, agencies are left frantically cutting whatever they can to meet an arbitrary quota—whether it's a redundant tax form or the entire concept of clean drinking water. This isn’t policymaking; it’s a high-stakes game show where the grand prize is corporate anarchy.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that reckless deregulation often leads to long-term crises disguised as short-term economic wins. Lax financial oversight gave us the 2008 meltdown, environmental rollbacks have turned lakes into toxic waste dumps, and ignoring workplace safety regulations has never made a single job site safer. But sure, let’s cut food safety measures and just hope the free market develops an antidote to E. coli.

This policy is like burning down the house to fix a leaky faucet—it’s bulldozing the hospital to make room for a parking lot. Imagine a city that wants to add a new traffic light but is forced to remove ten others first. The result? Absolute bedlam. Or consider a restaurant adding a new dish to the menu but being required to eliminate ten ingredients first, leaving diners with beautifully plated plates of air. It’s the kind of policy that makes perfect sense if you’ve never actually had to live under the policies you create.

Instead of thoughtful reform, we are witnessing a bureaucratic demolition derby where effectiveness is measured by how fast the wreckage piles up. A rational regulatory strategy would involve an independent, bipartisan review process—one that actually differentiates between what’s helpful and what’s just red tape for the sake of it. But instead, we have a haphazard, reactionary measure designed more for political optics than functional governance. There’s a fine line between efficiency and a free-for-all, and this executive order gleefully pole-vaults over it.

America deserves leadership that values effectiveness over performative destruction. If regulation reform is necessary (and it often is), it should be executed with a precision scalpel, not a steamroller on a caffeine bender. Otherwise, we aren’t fixing the system—we’re dynamiting it and hoping something better rises from the rubble.