Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are promising to go to war with the government red tape they say makes it harder to do business as part of their extra-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

But they will face formidable foes — and perhaps not just from those “unelected bureaucrats” they often pillory.

In addition to Washington’s historic appetite for new rules, the DOGE leaders could also find that Trump’s own campaign promises will lead to the sprouting of some new red tape.

If you are a business owner looking forward to government regulation reductions in the years ahead, the industry in which you operate could make all the difference.

Key deregulatory action is indeed in the offing in places like energy and financial services, said Dan Goldbeck, director of Regulatory Policy at the American Action Forum, a group that tracks regulations closely.

Musk on Wednesday suggested on X, his social-media platform, that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be abolished altogether.

“Delete CFPB,” he wrote. “There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

But Trump administration actions to come in areas like immigration and healthcare may end up pushing in the opposite direction, according to Goldbeck.

It’s “an interesting mixed bag,” he added.

President Trump in his first term — like Republican presidents before him — made cutting regulations into a key focus and even held photo-ops at the White House to underline his determination before the cameras.

But Trump, also like his predecessors, had a more mixed record overall.

During Trump’s entire first term, according to data from Goldbeck’s group, Washington finalized 1,336 regulations across a range of government agencies — with a total cost of $64.7 billion to business and almost 330 million paperwork hours.

In fact, Trump actually increased regulations on business in three of the four years he was in office. It was only in 2018 when the cost of regulations saw a decrease.

And Trump was still one of the most aggressive cutters in recent memory.

The American Action Forum tracked regulations all the way back to 2005 and found that Trump’s 2018 cuts marked the only year where the total finalized cost of government red tape came down during that two-decade span.

And those costs are way up in the Biden years: calculated to be a whopping $1.8 trillion so far.

Trump 1.0 also increased costs in areas like immigration and healthcare — with Goldbeck predicting Trump 2.0 could be similar.

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He noted, as one example, what could happen if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.

If “they are serious about going after agribusiness interests and pharmaceutical business’s interests, there’s potential for a fair amount of unexpected regulatory action compared to what maybe most folks expect.”

More red tape could also be created if Trump follows through on a pledge to deport undocumented immigrants.

“Implementing such a massive deportation program is going to be in a lot of ways regulatory in nature,” Goldbeck said.

Musk and Ramaswamy could also also face a legal environment that might not be quite as friendly to their cause as they hope.

In a recent op-ed, the duo argued that two recent Supreme Court decisions around regulations — West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo — would buttress their efforts.

But that claim led many legal experts confused. The decisions are indeed likely to increase the power of the judiciary and Congress to strike down regulations, but they offer much less clear implications for executive actions from a president.

Goldbeck adds that the slow pace of any regulatory change could also hamstring DOGE’s efforts to move quickly and show significant results by the group’s planned end date of July 4, 2026.

He notes that much of the coming Trump administration’s efforts will be focused on rescinding Biden-era rules that will take a complete rule-making process to complete.

“That’ll take at least a year or two to really come to fruition.”

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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