President Donald Trump heralding a new era of deregulatory policy. Credit: White House

The Trump administration had a “banner” year for regulatory reform in fiscal 2017, slowing “the production of new, costly regulations,” issuing “only three significant new” ones, and redirecting the “regulatory inertia,” Neomi Rao, President Donald Trump's regulatory czar, said Friday.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, noted Friday that Trump's “ambitious” executive orders issued last year calling for agencies to knock out two regulations for every new one and to impose zero regulatory cost in 2017, have worked.

“If you look back on the past year, what we see is that those orders focused attention on a very big problem of cumulative regulations,” said Rao, former professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, who was nominated to head OIRA by Trump last April.

“The administration didn't go after the problem with little scissors, but really with something more like the big, beautiful gold scissors … to cut red tape,” Rao said.

“The president directed the agencies to deregulate, and that's what they've been doing,” she said.