Trump’s Deregulation Gains Muscle—But Is He Skipping Leg Day?

The Trump 2.0 era has been marked by some extraordinary executive orders aimed at deregulation.

These include E.O.14,192’s one-in, ten-out initiative; E.O. 14219’s installation of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Team Leads at agencies to “commence the deconstruction” of the administrative state; E.O. 14,215’s extension of the Office of Management and Budget regulatory cost-benefit review to independent agencies; the restoration of emergency preparedness authority to states; and the scrubbing of grants and contracts that can sometimes serve as vehicles for regulatory laundering.

These directives are groundbreaking moves, and further guidance from the White House to agencies to maximize their synergies would be beneficial.

Beware The Swamp Things

Despite Trump-era deregulation efforts, “swamp things” persist—policies that, despite cutting some red tape, inadvertently or otherwise reinforce government power rather than curtail it.

Today, on Trump’s Liberation Day, consumer-smacking tariffs—described by some as the biggest tax hike in global history—serve as a reminder of these discordant notes. So does the floating of a DOGE dividend (potential fodder for the left’s long-sought universal basic income) and the wielding of federal university funding as a carrot-and-stick to influence and cancel speech and research, rather than simply eliminating such funding outright.

Two additional Trump executive orders this week would, in different ways, partly refill the swamp by expanding the remits of problematic agencies in shortsighted pursuit of glittery but temporary goals.

The first, “Combatting Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market” expands authorities at several federal bodies in the name of cracking down on concert ticket scalping. The second, “Establishing the United States Investment Accelerator” adds a new member to Washington’s 401 agencies and legitimizes the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act philosophy of government steering and industrial policy.

Regulating The Cost of Entertainment

With Kid Rock standing beside him in the Oval Office, Trump signed the “Combatting Unfair Practices” executive order, empowering the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Treasury Department. But if markets can’t handle price resale markets and venue ownership competition in the case of mere entertainment, the implication is that they can’t handle anything, let alone critical sectors like retirement, education, energy, or health care—nor much of the subject matter of Trump’s deregulatory executive orders. Trump’s remark on ticket scalping—“I didn’t know too much about it, but I checked it out and it is a big problem”—was something of a red flag.

The order directs the FTC to work with the U.S. Attorney General to “ensure that competition laws are appropriately enforced in the concert and entertainment industry, including where venues, ticketing agents, or combinations thereof operate to the detriment of artists and fans,” and to “rigorously enforce” the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act. New regulations to force disclosure of the dynamic pricing appear to be on tap—paving the way for a misguided attack on poorly understood innovations that are actually important in enabling economy-wide efficiencies (such as in airlines and hospitality). Interestingly, Combatting Unfair Practices also directs the Treasury Secretary and U.S. Attorney General to ensure “that ticket scalpers are operating in full compliance with the Internal Revenue Code.”

As CNN noted, “Trump’s order builds upon efforts by the Biden administration to crack down on junk fees in the concert ticket space,” referncing a December FTC rule “banning hidden ‘convenience’ or ‘service’ fees for concert tickets at checkout.” The “junk fees” narrative broadly assumes markets—from airlines to hospitality to entertainment—are incapable of adjusting on their own.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s order ignores the broader ticketing industry’s own countervailing market power, particularly in sports, where leagues and management firms represent artists, athletes, and venues. The executive order also fails to acknowledge preexisting government involvement, such as taxpayer-funded ownership of arenas or long-term contracts for ticketing services, which may be more responsible for market distortions than scalpers or resellers. Kid Rock’s observation that Ticketmaster is comfortable with the BOTS Act since it makes money on every resale was another red flag. The BOTS Act bans unauthorized bots, but most bots are authorized, and seemingly everyone up the chain uses them for pricing and resale, including artists.

While some artists (such as Neil Young and Robert Smith of The Cure) do disparage dynamic pricing, others may publicly bash Ticketmaster/Live Nation while quietly benefiting from the system. Artists and promoters can engage in pricing strategies and boost earnings by holding back tickets for high-priced VIP package sales, negotiating revenue-sharing deals with primary sellers like Ticketmaster or “scalping” their own tickets by reselling on secondary platforms like StubHub, and thus aren’t fully helpless victims. Besides, high prices largely reflect supply and demand; as Econ 101 will tell you, the demand curve is what the demand curve is; and at every price point there may be someone who will pay that price—and no more. In the pre-Internet age, the Cato Institute noted in “The Folly of Anti-Scalping Laws” that a solution to illegal scalping is legal scalping; now we have that. Price caps will only aggravate scarcity problems. As Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold put it, “I’d love to make the front row a mile wide and have it cost $39 — but it’s not reality.”

Trump’s executive order contends that when fans overpay, “the artists do not receive any profit. All profits go solely to the scalper and the ticketing agency.” This is an oversimplification. If artists aren’t profiting from resale, they should be pricing closer to market demand (and paying Trump’s proposed scalper tax themselves). If artist exploitation by management—once a staple of VH1’s Behind the Music—remains an issue, the real fix is an honest conversation with their agents, who are definitely getting paid.

Musical entertainment isn’t the only game in town, which opens other avenues for leverage. The sports industry offers a compelling parallel. In the 2023 paper, “The Law and Economics of Ticket Scalping” Matthew J. Parlow describes transformational secondary markets in the sports industry. Much like in music, Ticketmaster dominates primary sales, but as Parlow notes, “professional sports leagues and teams have entered the secondary ticket market at unprecedented levels because of the potential for significant revenue garnered from this ripe market.” This dynamic flips the script—major sports leagues wield substantial market power, not just Ticketmaster and Live Nation, meaning any cycle of exploitation, if it exists, could conceivably be broken by a united from between sports and entertainment. Given the clout of professional teams, it’s surprising that Trump’s executive order failed to acknowledge the sports industry’s role and how it might inform the broader debate.

Rather than expanding the BOTS Act or pursuing antitrust measures, policymakers should foster alternative ticketing networks. Nearly 40 percent of major venues are not controlled by Live Nation/Ticketmaster. With artist and sports industry coordination, today’s app-driven direct-to-fan tools could lower switching costs and disrupt exclusive contracts.

Another angle worth exploring is venue control. Live Nation doesn’t always own venues outright but operates them under long-term leases or management contracts. Many of these venues are taxpayer-funded or partially government-owned, built with public bonds and subsidies. To the extent that Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s dominance results from government favoritism, a more productive executive order—or perhaps better, reforms at the state and local level—could target that.

Rescue Breathing For The CHIPS Act Model: Institutionalizing Market Steering

The Investment Accelerator shall facilitate and accelerate investments above $1 billion in the United States by assisting investors as they navigate United States Government regulatory processes efficiently.

—E.O. on Establishing the United States Investment Accelerator

The second notable Trump directive this week, “Establishing the United States Investment Accelerator,” quite admirably seeks to “reduce regulatory burdens,” “increase access to and use of our national resources where appropriate,” and otherwise reduce barriers to domestic and foreign investment in the U.S. At the same time, however, it could help make CHIPS Act-style, industrial-policy steering a permanent fixture, by way of a new Investment Accelerator office at the Commerce Department charged to coordinate with the Treasury Department and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.

While streamlining regulations is a win, this order plays footsie with the misguided idea that Washington should steer private investment rather than simply get out of the way. With the explicit prioritization of investments over $1 billion, it’s potentially another example of Washington picking winners and losers rather than letting markets allocate resources.

Government help in the form of hand-holding major projects through the bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily fix problems—it to some extent legitimizes the broken system and expands the role of bureaucrats in business decisions, where politically connected firms benefit while others are left to navigate the same mess solo. Even worse, imagine the mischief the progressives bent on net-zero energy and massive government spending will do with an “investment accelerator” housed inside the White House. For real investment and growth, the answer isn’t an accelerator—it’s a bulldozer for the regulatory state.

Skipping Leg Day

What the Trump regime still lacks is foundational, philosophical challenges to the doctrine of “market failure” and to the presumption of agency expertise. To be fair, this sentiment is nearly fully absent in Congress as well. We should wish to see regulatory streamlining succeed long past the Trump era; but legitimizing suspect philosophies and functions within the very administrative state the administration is purportedly trying to deconstruct can inadvertently advance aims of those with more interventionist mindsets.

Certain things are foundational; on pricing and market power issues and on business resource allocation, Trump’s two orders miss the opportunity to highlight political failures across sectors. If these go unchallenged, they can complicate efforts to deregulate and extricate beneficial market activity from government and deliver structural deregulation.

To “commence deconstruction” means actual dismantling must occur. Just as skipping leg day at the gym leads to an unbalanced physique, skipping structural deregulation while preserving agencies and programs that should be eliminated leaves the economy vulnerable to permanent federal steering. A serious deregulation agenda requires fundamental changes—eliminating, not empowering, departments and agencies (some smaller bodies, along with the Department of Education, have been targeted), abolishing the enabling statutes that sustain the administrative state, cutting market-distorting subsidies, and dismantling regulatory agencies’ unchecked power. If that isn’t happening, at the very least, the scope of federal departments and agencies must not be expanded. The federal government has little vocabulary for this approach, yet it is essential to fostering free competition and delivering consumer benefits. If the swamp needs draining, it’s critical not to clog the pipes.