This is the one chart on the site built to refuse a verdict. Cutting regulations is not self-evidently good or bad: the same repealed rule is “red tape removed” to one person and “a safeguard removed” to another. So here is the raw regulatory volume, and the competing claims about cutting it, laid out both ways, with the reader left to decide. There is no accent color here and no standout, on purpose. Every dollar figure below is an estimate from an advocacy source; each is shown as claimed, not as fact.
Total pages published in the Federal Register each year, a rough proxy for regulatory volume. More pages can mean more protection, or more burden, depending on your view.
Volume swings with each administration (a sharp drop in 2017, an all-time high in 2024, another sharp drop in 2025) but page count says nothing about whether a given rule protects or burdens. That judgment is below.
The same actions, read two ways
Deregulation produces one set of facts and two honest stories. Here are the biggest recent claims, each shown from both chairs. The dollar figures are advocacy-group estimates, not settled numbers, and independent reviewers (the GAO, Brookings) note they routinely count avoided costs while ignoring the benefits a rule was giving up.
Trump I: the “2-for-1” order (EO 13771)
Read as: red tape cut
About 3 deregulatory actions for every new rule by FY2020, and roughly $199B in claimed 10-year savings (OMB).
Read as: safeguards removed
Nearly all of that “saving” was a single rule (auto fuel economy). Strip it out and regulatory costs actually rose ~$30B (AAF).
Trump II: the “10-for-1” order (EO 14192, 2025)
Read as: red tape cut
A 10-for-1 target; 40 deregulatory actions and 22 Biden-era rules repealed by Congress in 2025; ~$130B in claimed net savings.
Read as: safeguards removed
Two rules supply nearly all of that. Without them, 2025 would have added ~$9.4B in net costs (AAF). The repeals also strip consumer, environmental, and workplace protections.
Biden: the regulatory record
Read as: burden added
About $1.8 trillion in new compliance costs over four years (AAF): the burden side of the ledger.
Read as: protection added
That figure sums agencies' own cost estimates and counts only costs, not the health, safety, and environmental benefits the rules deliver (GAO, Brookings).
Why this chart has no winner. Counts are not magnitude: one 900-page rule and one 2-page rule each count as “one,” and Federal Register pages include proposed rules, notices, and corrections, not just binding law. The dollar figures are advocacy-driven, self-reported by agencies, assumption-dependent, and usually dominated by a single mega-rule in either direction, so they appear here as “claimed by [source],” never as fact. Definitions shifted mid-series (the “significant rule” threshold was raised in 2023, then the framework was rewritten in 2025), breaking clean cross-era comparison, and January pages get attributed to whichever president was leaving. Above all, deregulation is a genuine values tradeoff: “less burden” and “less safeguard” are the same act seen from two chairs. That is why there is no accent, no record-high styling, and no standout on this page. The 2025 bar is the final page number of that year's volume (61,584), which runs slightly above the compiled totals used for the other years.