Bloomberg Law, October 2025
The Trump administration is repeatedly disregarding the notice-and-comment process normally required for creating or repealing regulations, raising alarms from those who say it’s sidestepping safeguards against arbitrary and ineffective government action.
The rules impacted so far involve policies ranging from creating a new immigration police force to the Agriculture Department dropping the consideration of race and sex for awarding loans, grants, and benefits.
In one case, President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming no comment period was necessary to loosen water-flow limits on showerheads simply because he said so, based on his effort “to end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again.”
Agencies have offered justifications for circumventing the normal notice-and-comment process to quickly get their policies in place. Those efforts to streamline rulemaking are part of the administration’s disruptive approach across the government, but seem more haphazard and spread across disparate agencies than the product of a widely adopted, systematic plan.
