Why Amazon Keeps Losing Regulatory Battles With Unions

Chalk it up to Trump’s incompetence.

Less than one month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration I ventured the prediction that Trump’s anti-regulation strategy, which was to gum up operations at regulatory agencies in every conceivable way, was self-defeating. (See “Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree.”) To deregulate, I explained, a regulatory agency must be functional. Eliminating a Biden-era regulation is a process: It requires an agency to propose a new regulation reversing the prior one; collect public comment on same; and follow various other time-consuming steps required under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. The same logic applied to eliminating Biden-era precedents at quasi-judicial independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or the National Labor Relations Board. To achieve these goals, you need a quorum at such agencies. Firing board members and refusing to fill vacancies, which is Trump’s preferred method, deprives you of that quorum.

Disciplined deregulation requires the sort of patience and intelligence that, happily, is in short supply within the Trump administration. Even White House budget chief Russell “Project 2025” Vought can’t summon it.

What this means is that, although Trump has reversed a lot of executive orders, fired a lot of people, and cut off a lot of funding (often, in the latter two instances, in violation of the law), he hasn’t killed a lot of major regulations. I count five thus far, according to a regulatory tracker maintained by the Brookings Institution, of which only one—an Environmental Protection........

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