The One-Sentence Version
A rule can be repealed, or it can be left on the books and not enforced, or the agency that enforces it can be cut until it cannot — all three have happened since 2025, and the measurable effects show up in food-safety tracing, workplace enforcement, drinking water standards, and how many fraud cases get prosecuted.
What You Need to Know First
What a regulation actually is
Congress passes laws in general terms. A law might say drinking water must be safe, or workplaces must not expose people to unreasonable risk. It rarely says how many parts per trillion of a specific chemical is too many, because Congress does not have the technical capacity to set thousands of numbers like that and keep them updated.
So Congress delegates. It creates an agency, gives it authority, and the agency writes the specific rules. Those rules are regulations. They go through a public process: the agency proposes a rule, publishes it, takes comments from anyone who wants to weigh in including the affected industry, and then finalizes it. That process usually takes years.
Why deregulation is not automatically bad
This is the part worth getting right before anything else, because a lot of writing on this subject skips it.
Regulations impose real costs. Someone has to comply, someone has to document compliance, and both cost money that could have gone to wages or expansion. Some rules genuinely outlive their purpose. Some were written for an industry that no longer works the way it did. Some impose costs out of all proportion to the benefit, and cost-benefit analysis is a legitimate tool, used by administrations of both parties.
There is also a real democratic argument. Agency staff are not elected. When an agency writes a rule that carries the force of law, unelected officials are making policy, and people across the political spectrum have raised that objection for decades.
Every administration since Carter has removed regulations. The question this explainer asks is not whether removing rules is legitimate. It is what has been removed since 2025, through what mechanism, and what has happened since.
The three mechanisms
This is the distinction that makes the rest of the subject legible, and it is the one most coverage collapses.
One: repeal the rule. The formal route. The agency proposes to rescind, takes comments, finalizes. It is public, it is on the record, and it can be challenged in court.
Two: keep the rule, stop enforcing it. The rule stays on the books. Inspections do not happen, referrals are not prosecuted, penalties are not assessed. Nothing is published, because nothing formally changed.
Three: cut the agency. The rule stands and the enforcers are told to enforce it, but there are half as many of them. No policy is announced. Capacity just falls.
Only the first mechanism produces a document that shows up in a count of “regulations repealed.” The other two are harder to see and, in several cases below, have had larger measurable effects.
What Actually Happened
Drinking water
In April 2024 the EPA finalized the first national drinking water limits for PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that do not break down in the environment or the body. The standards had been in development for more than a decade.[1]
Those standards were rolled back. PFAS compounds are present in the drinking water of roughly 100 million Americans, and exposure is linked to kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other conditions.[1]
This is mechanism one, the formal route, and it is the kind of action that is straightforward to point at.
Food safety
Here the mechanism was staffing, and the effect shows up in a number worth sitting with.
In 2024 the FDA investigated 26 foodborne outbreaks and identified the source in 20 of them, about 77 percent. In 2025 it closed 11 investigations and identified the source in four, about 36 percent.[2]
Finding the source is the step that makes a recall useful. If investigators know it was a specific lot from a specific facility, that product comes off shelves and the outbreak stops. If they never find it, contaminated food stays out there while people keep getting sick, and the recall, when it comes, is broader and later than it needed to be.
What changed: in March 2025, HHS announced the removal of 3,500 FDA staff, about 20 percent of the agency, including more than 170 people from the Office of Inspections and Investigations. The FDA lost 3,859 employees over 2025 and 473 more in 2026. The CDC lost about a quarter of its staff. FoodNet, the network that tracks foodborne illness, cut the number of microbes and parasites it monitors from eight to two. Inspections of foreign food facilities fell to historic lows.[2]
One honest caveat about that headline figure: the 2025 number rests on 11 closed investigations, which is a small sample, and one unusual year could move it. The staffing cuts, the surveillance reduction and the drop in foreign inspections are documented separately and do not depend on it.[2]
Fraud enforcement
Two federal data series moved in opposite directions over the same period.
Federal prosecutors now pursue 24 percent of white-collar criminal referrals, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That is the lowest rate since TRAC began tracking in 1986. Three of every four fraud and financial-crime referrals are closed without prosecution. Prosecutions fell from 10,269 in fiscal 1994 to a projected 3,862 in fiscal 2025.[3]
Meanwhile the Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost a record $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, up from $12.5 billion in 2024. Reported losses are up roughly 430 percent since 2020. The FTC received 3 million fraud reports. People aged 50 and older reported $4.3 billion in losses.[4]
It is tempting to connect those two directly, and the connection may well be real. But the evidence does not establish it yet. White-collar prosecution rates have been declining across administrations for three decades, and fraud reporting is affected by awareness campaigns and by how easy it is to file a report. What is documented is narrower and still striking: federal fraud enforcement reached its lowest recorded rate in the same period that reported consumer fraud losses reached their highest.
Who owns a company
In 2021 Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act as part of a defense spending package. It required most corporations and LLCs to report who actually owns them, meaning anyone holding 25 percent or more or exercising substantial control. The purpose was to make anonymous shell companies harder to use for moving money.[5]
In August 2026 the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network permanently ended that requirement. It also announced it will delete the ownership records Americans had already filed.[5]
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department is “eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.” Senator Elizabeth Warren called it a “gift to cartels, criminals and U.S. adversaries that exploit shell companies to move millions through our financial system.”[5]
Both of those are worth reading as stated. The reporting requirement did fall on millions of small businesses that have nothing to hide, and complying with it cost them time and money. That is a real burden and not an imaginary one.
The part that is different in kind is the deletion. A reporting requirement can be reinstated by a later Congress or administration. Records that have been destroyed cannot be recovered, and the ownership history they documented goes with them.
Data centers
Three EPA actions in mid-2026, at different stages, together removed most federal environmental oversight of the data center buildout.
Proposed: a rule making it voluntary, at the discretion of state and some local officials, for data centers to publicly disclose their air pollution. Announced: the EPA will not set any national environmental standard for data centers, leaving water use, cooling design and air quality to states. Announced: power plants that serve only data centers, and do not connect to the public grid, are exempt from the pollution limits meant to prevent acid rain.[6]
The strongest objection here is not “no disclosure.” It is about who ends up making the call. State and local governments competed to attract these facilities with tax incentives and hold business agreements with their operators. Giving those same governments discretion over whether the facilities disclose their pollution puts the decision with parties that have a financial interest in the answer.[6]
Workplaces
OSHA enforcement was cut and the heat stress rule, which would have set the first federal standard for working in extreme heat, was killed. Worker injury reporting requirements were rolled back.[7]
The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s silica rule, finalized in 2024 after more than 50 years of regulatory delay and the strongest federal tool for limiting coal miners’ exposure to the dust that causes black lung, was delayed indefinitely.[8]
Wage and hour enforcement cases declined 97 percent.[7]
Common Claims and What the Evidence Shows
“Regulations were strangling the economy and cutting them frees up growth.”
There is a serious version of this argument. Compliance costs are real, they fall hardest on smaller firms that cannot spread them across a large operation, and some rules do impose costs out of proportion to their benefit. Economists across the spectrum accept that regulatory burden is a genuine variable.
What the argument does not tell you is which rules were cut. The case for removing an outdated paperwork requirement is not the case for removing drinking water limits, and treating them as the same category obscures more than it explains. The specific actions above were not selected by an independent review that found them unnecessary. Several were finalized after a decade or more of study, and several have identifiable beneficiaries who lobbied for their removal.
“These are just paused, not gone. A future administration can restore them.”
Mostly true, and worth saying. Rules can be rewritten, and several of these actions are already being challenged in court, with some blocked. The childhood immunization schedule change was stayed by a federal court in March 2026.[9]
Two things do not come back on their own. Deleted records are gone; there is no version of reinstating the Corporate Transparency Act that recovers the ownership filings that were destroyed. And institutional capacity takes years to rebuild, because experienced inspectors and investigators who leave do not queue up to return.
“Fraud is up because enforcement collapsed.”
The two facts are documented. The causal link between them is not established, for the reasons in the fraud section above. Stated as two series that hit their recorded extremes in the same period, the claim is solid. Stated as cause and effect, it goes further than the evidence.
“Nobody has actually been hurt yet.”
Some harms are measurable now: the outbreak source-tracing rate, the fraud losses, the enforcement figures. Some are the kind that take years to surface, which is the nature of exposure-based harm. Black lung takes decades to develop. PFAS-linked cancers do too.
That cuts both ways honestly. It means the full effect of these changes is not yet visible, and it also means anyone claiming to know the final toll is guessing.
Where Things Stand Now
- PFAS drinking water standards: rolled back. Roughly 100 million Americans have PFAS in their water.[1]
- Food safety: the FDA identified the source in 36 percent of outbreak investigations closed in 2025, down from 77 percent in 2024. FoodNet tracks two pathogens, down from eight.[2]
- Fraud enforcement: 24 percent of white-collar referrals prosecuted, the lowest since 1986. Reported consumer fraud losses hit a record $15.9 billion in 2025.[3][4]
- Shell companies: the ownership registry is repealed and filed records are being deleted.[5]
- Data centers: the disclosure rule is proposed and its comment period closed in August 2026; the national-standard decision and the acid rain exemption are announced.[6]
- Workplace: the heat rule is dead, the silica rule is delayed indefinitely, and wage and hour enforcement cases are down 97 percent.[7][8]
- Courts: several of these actions are being challenged, and some have been blocked or stayed.[9]
The question of whether any individual rule should exist is a policy judgment, and reasonable people land in different places on most of them. The question this explainer tries to answer is narrower and factual: what was removed, by which of the three mechanisms, and what the measurable effects have been so far.
Sources
1. EPA: Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) under the Safe Drinking Water Act and NPR: The EPA delays limits on PFAS in drinking water and The Guardian: Trump administration EPA and PFAS in water (May 18, 2026) and Environmental Working Group: PFAS contamination map
2. ProPublica: Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts and San Francisco Chronicle: Food safety experts fear next outbreak could be deadlier as Trump cuts weaken oversight and FoodNavigator: FDA and USDA staff cuts under Trump raise food safety risks (February 16, 2026)
3. TRAC (Syracuse University): Federal Prosecution of White-Collar Crimes Receiving Less and Less Attention and Stanford Law School: U.S. Justice Department White-Collar Criminal Prosecutions Fall To Their Lowest Level On Record and TRAC: White Collar Crime Prosecutions for March 2026
4. Federal Trade Commission: FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025 and The Spokesman-Review: Americans lost a record $15.9 billion to scams in 2025, FTC says and AARP: FBI Report — Internet Crime Losses Hit $20.9 Billion
5. U.S. Department of the Treasury: FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners and Accounting Today: FinCEN ends beneficial ownership reporting and PYMNTS: FinCEN Killed the Beneficial Ownership Database but Banks Still Need the Data
6. Sierra Club: EPA Proposes Air Pollution Exemption “Deal” for Data Centers (July 2026) and The Register: EPA to drop requirement for public notice of polluting datacenters (August 25, 2026) and National Ground Water Association: EPA announces it won’t set nationwide standards for data centers
7. Good Jobs First: Worker Protections in Freefall — The Collapse of Federal Labor Enforcement Under the Second Trump Administration and NPR: Trump cuts NIOSH, the agency studying toxic chemicals and workplace hazards and Bureau of Labor Statistics: Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries
8. Kentucky Lantern: Federal regulators indefinitely delay rule to protect coal miners from black lung (April 9, 2026) and KFF Health News: Black lung, coal miners, silica dust and the federal rule rollback and Mother Jones: Black lung resurgence in Appalachia as silica regulations are delayed (May 2026)
9. Congressional Research Service: Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026 (IN12684)