JEFF CHILDERS

But that was just the latest of the Swamp’s problems. They were typing up their latest lawsuits when a new executive order dropped and they spilled their Vente mochas into the keyboard. The USPS takeover was nothing. Yesterday, President Trump made things much, much worse.

Yesterday, Politico reported another Trump masterstroke in a story headlined, “Trump executive order requires sweeping review of federal regulations.” Wait till you hear about this one. It’s about to replace the 4-D chessboard with a new 5-D one.

The newest executive order is titled, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Regulatory Initiative.” They had no idea this was coming. It stacked on several previous EOs and relies on last year’s terrific Supreme Court decisions about agency powers. We will need to peek inside it to find all the presents.

First, the order began with the shot-heard-round-the-Swamp. The war on the Deep State has entered its public phase. Trump’s forces fired on Fort Sumter. It was an open declaration of war:

Boom. “It is the policy of my Administration … to commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

The “overbearing and burdensome administrative state?” That’s a synonym for the Swamp, the Deep State. Trump is commencing its deconstruction.

Section two begins the order. “Agency heads shall, in coordination with their DOGE Team Leads and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, initiate a process to review all regulations … for consistency with law and Administration policy.”

They are going to review all the regulations. All of them.

During that comprehensive review, seven categories of regulations must be identified for the chopping block. I couldn’t pick a favorite example, so here they all are:

In the meantime, Agency heads are ordered to “de-prioritize enforcement” of any regulations that exceed constitutional or statutory authority —based on the Supreme Court’s latest trimming of agency authority— or that do not comply with Administration policy.

If the progressive left thought it already had its hands full firefighting employment lawsuits, that was nothing. This order lights fires all over the national regulatory landscape.

The implications are staggering. The regulatory state is vast, far bigger even than actual laws passed by Congress, which is saying a lot. I’ve suggested before in C&C that if Trump really wanted to kick off an economic renaissance in this country, he should prune a lot of regulation that stifles innovation and small business development.

I was thinking way too small.

He’s going to prune the whole thing.

And he put DOGE in charge. Forget Elon Musk. DOGE is just another name for an existing agency —the repurposed Digital Services Agency, whose charter is increasing efficiency— and which reports directly to the White House. In other words, Trump has a monitoring team in every important government agency watching like hawks to ensure the order gets carried out.

This order just made DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts look like a local comedian putting on a warmup act while the band was running late. Now the band has taken the stage to a sold-out arena. Regular readers know that I wondered whether the whole cost-cutting binge, welcome as it was, was just a distraction or decoy while the DOGE team gathered data. But for what?

This order is the political equivalent of the Moon falling out of orbit and smashing into the Earth.

Suddenly the Golden Age looks a lot less like a typical oversold campaign promise and more like a potential reality. There is no way to estimate the potentially explosive effect cutting massive red tape could produce for the economy, technological innovation, and small business creation. It’s potentially infinite.

And politically? It’s another masterstroke. Every single person outside government is going to be thinking hard about how de-regulation could affect their industry and their prospects. Democrats will be forced to defend the indefensible regulatory behemoth. It will unwind decades of governmental picking of winners and losers.