Donald Trump just scrapped President Biden’s 2021 “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.”
Singer Kid Rock, left, and US President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, March 31, 2025. The order directs the Federal Trade Commission to work with the Department of Justice to ensure that competition laws are enforced in the concert and entertainment industry, and pushes state consumer protection authorities on enforcement. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
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That’s good news. In a column that summer of four years ago (“How Biden’s Executive Order On Promoting Competition Instead Consolidates Government Power” I detailed how Biden’s order was uninterested in actually unleashing competition, and instead about expanding Washington’s power over the economy and calling it competition, classic newspeak style.
Biden’s directive even created a “Competition Council” with a staff of lordly busybodies that hosted a series of confabs, reinforcing the top-down cartelization and centralization enshrined in the order. That’s gone now—but policymakers need to ensure there’s not a new Trump version of the same.
Trump’s delightfully short and sweet new order (“Revocation of Executive Order on Competition”) simply “hereby” revokes Biden’s. The only surprising part is that this revocation didn’t come earlier since Trump has axed numerous Biden orders as part of the overall regulatory streamlining project.
When Biden’s 2021 order appeared, media headlines dutifully promised crackdowns on “monopolies” and a boost to competition “across the board.” The reality of the order and a series of reinforcing actions during that administration was an aggressive blueprint for centralizing authority in sectors that were already among the most heavily regulated and subsidized in our entire economy. Agriculture, airlines, broadband, banking, health care, technology policy—all of them were in Biden’s crosshairs, but curiously enough total strangers to laissez-faire.
Despite promising to promote competition, the order didn’t remove regulatory constraints but amplified them, even engaging so-called independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission in expanded antitrust and pricing interventions. It unleashed regulators from the modest restraints of the prior Trump 1.0 era, after having already issued a directive called “Modernizing Regulatory Review” that did away with traditional audit-like review of regulations altogether.
Biden claimed during the signing of his order to be “a proud capitalist,” but the directive’s content told another story, as, in fact, did Biden’s embrace of unbounded “whole-of-government” intervention. Biden saw government as both an architect and referee of markets, tasking it with preservation of “competition” and maintenence of progressive social policies in ESG and DEI.
The few deregulatory crumbs of that era, like over-the-counter hearing aids and some occupational licensing relief, were overwhelmed by moves toward federal agenda-setting. The winners in such an environment are political appointees, entrenched regulators and politically connected corporations and cronies instead of consumers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Trump’s revocation this week ends the formal framework for this government-first “competition” policy. That’s necessary and welcome but not the end of concerns. Despite the aggressive rollbacks by the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Energy and Transportation, agencies retain all their powers for the next set of progressive appointees to unbox yet again.
Instead, abolition of departments and agencies outright, plus broader regulatory reforms to constrain the structure that remains, is necessary. But that requires congressional action; and so far, while Congress has voted to overturn more than a dozen Biden rules, it has enacted no broad regulatory reforms whatsoever.
Without the big steps, the bureaucracy will keep finding ways to steer markets, pick winners and losers and embed itself into emerging sectors like artificial intelligence and smart cities and infrastructure.
The most worrisome elements at the moment are Trump’s own swampy impulses that not infrequently manifest, such as tariffs (the most prominent), antitrust regulation, a sovereign wealth fund, campus speech codes, regulation of concert ticket prices, drug price interventions and the like.
In the wake of Trump abolishing Biden’s competition order, it would represent a huge fail for some of his own policies to serve as the basis for future progressive regulatory power grabs, but they will if the trend continues.
Trump’s revocation of Biden’s misnamed competition executive order is a move in the right direction. Needed now is sustained commitment to full-throated deregulation that goes beyond undoing the overreach of the last administration and that rolls back decades of accumulated centralization that began more than a century before Biden. Thus far, Trump is not wholeheartedly doing that, but there are at least three years to go to turn the ship around.
As I’d fretted on these pages when Biden issued his 2021 competition order, “No one seems concerned over the resultant cronyism and corporate welfare, nor over the temporal distortion of technology advancements, nor over intellectual property ambiguities created by government banging around in the entrepreneurial process with its ‘appropriations’.”
Like the Democrats, Republicans sport an inability to recognize government force as the monopoly of concern and the most worrisome impediment to competition. In turn, they almost uniformly support their own versions of Biden’s policies—ranging from publicly funded research, to subsidies for manufacturing, to pricing intervention—just branded differently.
Promoting competiton in the American economy still remains the north star, if not the appropriate title of an executive order.
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