After the 2016 election surprise, congressional Republicans, flush with enthusiasm over the prospect of holding both legislative houses and the presidency, determined to take on the administrative state. Industry leaders and think tanks were invited to help compile a list of particularly egregious regulations. The immediate plan was to employ a powerful but rarely successful legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act. A product of the 1996 Gingrich revolution, the act empowers Congress to override any regulation within 60 days of its promulgation. Each review roughly resembles regular legislation; it can’t be filibustered, but it is subject to presidential veto, which is largely why the act has been successfully deployed only one time, early in the first term of George W. Bush.

President Trump has signed 14 such actions in 2017.

That’s meaningful but mostly symbolic in the face of a regulatory regime that has added an average of 13,000 new restrictions annually for the past 20 years. “It’s like pissing in the ocean,” says McLaughlin.