It’s Tuesday, so I guess it’s time for another executive order. Is it “Good Trump” or “Bad Trump” this time?

Yesterday, the Daily Signal reported this:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at slashing regulations on American small businesses.

The order will expand regulatory review with the goal of dramatically peeling back federal regulations. The order is the Trump administration’s first step in repealing two regulations for every new regulation put forth, CNBC reports.

The measure also sets a $0 budget for new regulations in 2017, and a cap on the cost of any new regulations going forward. Once in effect, it will require federal agencies to propose any new regulatory rules to the White House for official review.

[…]By signing the order, Trump is following through on his campaign promise to put a moratorium on any new regulations when he takes office. Trump also promised to end “all unnecessary regulations” imposed on the energy industry and to “dismantle” the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

It’s good Trump!

Last week, there was another executive order designed to halt pending regulations.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that so far, Trump has halted $181 Billion (with a B) in regulatory costs:

In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump effectively halted nearly $200 billion worth of regulations, according to a new analysis.

President Trump has taken aggressive action to curb regulations in his first week, promising to cut 75 percent or “maybe more,” and signing an executive order Monday to cut two regulations from the books when every new rule is introduced.

The first move came in the form of a memo to all federal agencies from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, freezing all recently finalized and pending regulations. The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, found the action resulted in stopping rules that would cost the economy $181 billion.

Getting rid of regulations is important, because it frees up small businesses to put more resources on expanding and job creation. Most jobs are created by small businesses, and they are definitely complaining more lately about being overregulated.

The American Enterprise Institute explains:

Startups have been on the decline for 30 years, and I have written frequently on some of the possible reasons. One big open question: To what extent is government regulation playing a role in that decline? A blog post by Scott Shane, professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, offers a few data points that suggest rules and red tape could be hindering business formation. He notes, for instance, small business owners are complaining more about regulation than they have in the past — twice as much as in the 1980s, for instance. And this:

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, federal regulation has been rising, while new business creation has been falling, as the chart above indicates. Researchers at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation believe the pattern is more than a coincidence. The per capita rate of new employer business creation and number of rules pages in the Federal Register — a common measure of the scope of federal regulation — correlate -0.67 over the 1977 to 2012 period. Similarly, the per capita rate of business creation and the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulation — another frequently used estimate of government rulemaking — correlate -0.78 over the same period. (A correlation of 1.00 means that two numbers move in perfect concert.)

Correlation may not prove correlation, but it can provide a helpful lead on where to look for the problem.

Trump’s focus seems to be to get job creation started again by lifting the tax and regulatory burdens on those who create jobs. That’s a very different focus than his predecessor.