Trump directs agencies to quietly repeal regulations — without public notice
Hassan Ali Kanum Politico, 4/10/25
President Donald Trump has instructed federal agencies and their assigned DOGE teams to repeal any existing regulations that are inconsistent with his priorities without providing advance notice or going through the traditional public input process.
The move accelerates the White House’s sprawling efforts to dismantle the federal regulatory machine, although Trump’s directive to skip the notice-and-comment process will likely face legal challenges. It also may squeeze out contrarian voices — such as civil rights advocates, labor unions and environmentalist groups — from weighing in on the administration’s deregulatory campaign.
Trump’s Wednesday presidential memo instructs agency leaders to move forward with a government-wide “review-and-repeal effort,” citing 10 recent Supreme Court rulings to assert that they can proceed much more quietly because many existing regulations have now been rendered illegal. The normal “notice-and-comment proceedings are ‘unnecessary’ where repeal is required as a matter of law to ensure consistency with a ruling of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote.
The White House directive appears to claim that the high court’s 2024 ruling known as Loper Bright applies retroactively, although the court’s conservative justices held explicitly that the decision is forward-looking.
The Loper Bright ruling overturned the Reagan-era Chevron precedent, which gave agencies primary discretion to interpret certain ambiguous federal laws and regulations rather than the courts.
We “do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful — including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself — are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.”
Trump wrote nonetheless that “recent” rulings require the repeal of “unlawful regulations — often promulgated in reliance on now-superseded Supreme Court decisions.”
The legal advocacy group Democracy Forward said in a statement that Trump’s actions are unlawful and harmful to the public.
“The policies and programs that the nation has put in place, and that have served communities for decades, cannot be undone with the arbitrary stroke of a pen,” Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said. Perryman pledged that her organization will “see this administration in court to protect people and democracy.”
The Supreme Court cases cited in the memo stretch back to 2015 and were mostly decided by the court’s conservative majority. Most involved litigation against the EPA, which could signal a more aggressive push to roll back that agency’s pollution rules and other regulations.
The White House also cited a ruling that established the “major questions doctrine,” which instructs judges to presume that Congress doesn’t give agencies power over matters with major, national economic and political impact. Its inclusion could give agency heads almost unbounded discretion to repeal rules and regulations, including long-standing agency policies.
To bypass the traditional public review process, Trump pointed to an exception laid out in the Administrative Procedure Act. The law requires agencies to issue public notice that explains their reasoning and identifies their legal authority to change rules and regulations. It also allows stakeholders and members of the public to submit comments and propose modifications before those rules are finalized. In effect, rescinding or repealing a rule requires an agency to issue a new formulation to replace the old rule.
There is also a “good cause” exception in the law that allows agencies to skip the notice-and-comment process when it would be “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.”
“Retaining and enforcing facially unlawful regulations is clearly contrary to the public interest,” Trump wrote in the memo.