Washington’s red tape machine finally met some sharp scissors

Affordability has become a problem for nearly every American. Inflation and the rising cost of living keep chewing through paychecks, and the old markers of the American dream — home ownership, small-business ownership, a secure retirement — feel farther out of reach than they have in years.

Some people respond by demanding more government involvement in daily life. President Trump has taken the opposite view: The government should step back.

Success will not come only from repealing rules. It will come when regulators stop seeing entrepreneurs as problems to manage and start seeing them as partners in growth.

Within days of returning to office, Trump signed two major executive orders aimed at saving money for business owners and taxpayers alike: Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation and the much-discussed DOGE initiative. Their core principle was simple: For every new federal regulation, agencies should eliminate 10 old ones.

One year later, the results are real.

I have spent that year on the front lines of the fight against unnecessary regulation as a regional advocate in the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. Congress established the office in 1976, but it has taken on renewed life under the current administration.

My team and I have spent the past year meeting with small-business owners — many still trying to recover from the economic damage of the COVID lockdown era — to identify ways the federal government can serve as a partner instead of a roadblock.

Nationwide, our team has met with more than 12,000 businesses.

The full report is available publicly, but the top-line results from the past year are straightforward:

• We flagged more than 300 regulatory issues for federal regulators.
• We helped influence changes to 23 federal regulations affecting millions of businesses.
• We saved small businesses nearly $110 billion in unnecessary regulatory costs.

That last number is significant, but it also shows the scale of the broader problem. Federal regulation costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion a year by some estimates — roughly 12% of GDP. Much of that burden falls hardest on smaller firms that cannot absorb legal and compliance costs the way large corporations can. Meanwhile, the Code of Federal Regulations has swollen from a few thousand pages decades ago to more than 180,000 pages today.

For small businesses, that kind of regulatory sprawl is not an abstraction. It is a threat.

Big companies can keep in-house counsel, compliance officers, and HR departments on payroll. A family business, a contractor, or a startup working out of a garage cannot. Excessive regulation tilts the playing field toward the largest players and against the very people most likely to create new jobs and local wealth.

For too long, federal rulemaking has treated small-business owners as an afterthought. We once heard that giant firms were “too big to fail.” Today, many small businesses face a different reality: they are becoming too small to succeed.

RELATED: Republicans and Democrats are in revolt — for very different reasons

Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

One of the most effective tools we have built to push back is the SBA’s Red Tape Hotline — 1-800-827-5722 — which allows small-business owners to speak directly with federal staff about regulatory burdens and offer suggestions for reform. Through that hotline, we have heard from thousands of people we could not have reached in person.

Our broader goal is to improve the regulatory climate for every business owner in the country. But even saving a mom-and-pop shop a few billable hours with an attorney can make a real difference.

In one especially memorable case, SBA staff helped a toy company in Mississippi clear a shipment through Customs and Border Protection in time for December — literally saving Christmas for that business.

The philosophy behind this work is the same one that guided me as mayor of Riverton, Utah, where I recently completed two terms. Riverton has grown because we kept taxes, fees, and regulations low enough for businesses to thrive. Companies came, jobs followed, and the city’s sales-tax revenue doubled during my time in office. Watching that same pro-growth approach work at the national level has been deeply rewarding.

Still, this is only a first down, not a touchdown.

Success will not come only from repealing rules. It will come when regulators stop seeing entrepreneurs as problems to manage and start seeing them as partners in growth. If we can make that shift, we can do more than trim costs. We can make the American dream attainable again.