THE ROLLBACK
Every protection you thought you had.
Sources: Federal Register · EPA, DOL and DOJ Records · CBO · Bureau of Labor Statistics · GAO · GWU Regulatory Studies Center · Brookings Reg Tracker
The cost of regulation is measured in dollars. The cost of deregulation is measured in lives.— David Michaels — Former OSHA Administrator, Author of 'The Triumph of Doubt'
Since January 2025 the Trump administration has rolled back, weakened, delayed or stopped enforcing federal regulations and protections across every area of American life. Clean air. Clean water. Workplace safety. Overtime pay. Civil rights. Food assistance. Gun safety. Disability access. Consumer protection.
These are not abstract policy changes. They are the rules that kept arsenic out of your drinking water, required your employer to pay you overtime, protected your child from lead poisoning, gave you recourse when you were discriminated against, and ensured the food on your table was safe.
Every rollback has a beneficiary. Chemical companies avoid billions in cleanup costs. Employers extract more labor for less pay. Corporations escape discrimination liability. Gun manufacturers sell untraceable weapons. The pattern is consistent: the costs are socialized onto workers, families, and communities, while the profits are privatized to corporations and donors.
Why Nobody Agrees
on the Number
Published counts of this administration's deregulatory actions range from dozens to several hundred. The range is not a dispute about facts. It is a dispute about what counts.
The administration's own headline figure was a 129-to-1 ratio of deregulatory actions to new regulations over the first eight months of the term, against a 10-to-1 target set by executive order. The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center examined how that was calculated and found the methodology inconsistent: new regulations were counted narrowly, only "significant" rules with annual economic effects of at least $100 million, while deregulatory actions were counted broadly, including repeals of rules that were no longer in effect along with guidance documents, policy letters and internal agency materials.
Researcher Tambudzai Charumbira allowed that counting sub-regulatory materials is defensible on its own terms, since guidance and policy letters can impose real compliance burdens on businesses. The problem was applying one standard to one side of the ratio and a different standard to the other.
The same analysis found the deregulatory push had a measurable effect regardless of how the ratio was computed. The Federal Register ran to 61,600 pages in 2025, the lowest first-year total of any recent administration.
This series does not try to settle the total. It documents individual actions, each with its own record and sources, and the count on this page is simply how many of those are documented here. Where an action is proposed rather than final, or announced rather than published, the pages say so.
The Anatomy of
a Rollback
Every rollback follows the same playbook. Understanding the pattern makes the individual stories impossible to dismiss as coincidence.
You can't enforce rules with no one left to enforce them.
No rule means no violation — and no accountability.
What isn't counted doesn't count.
The building is there. The mission is gone.
What's
Being Lost
Former regulators, scientists, and enforcement officials on what these rollbacks mean.
We went from being able to inspect every workplace in America once every 186 years to something even worse. And then they killed the heat rule. Workers will die because of this.
The Civil Rights Division was established in 1957. It survived Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes. It took this administration 14 months to destroy it.
There is no safe level of lead exposure for children. Every year of delay is another year of irreversible brain damage. The science is not ambiguous.
Choose a
Section
Each section documents what was rolled back, who it affects, and who benefits — with the specific regulations, the dollar figures, and the enforcement data.
Workers pay with their health. Families pay with their water. Communities pay with their safety. Corporations pay nothing. Every rollback follows the same pattern — and it's all documented here.