Congress doesn't write federal regulations. Executive branch agencies do, within very broad guidelines that Congress has put in the statutes empowering those agencies. A lot of what Trump is proposing here can be done without any Congressional action at all; it's just a matter of changing the priorities of the agencies who write the regulations.

Of course, doing that is a much, much bigger job than I think Trump realizes.

This is fantastic. That's exactly how it should be. Otherwise over decades you end up with regulations that stifle all forms of entrepreneurship and creativity.

What is a unit of "regulation"? I can pack five thousand onerous rules into one document and eliminate two documents that contain guidance with very minor impact. Is that a net gain?

Next time you write a line of code, you have to delete two others.

What would happen if we applied this for 4 years on an existing codebase, such as the Linux Kernel?

People would fix the low hanging fruit and leave the hard/hairy parts that need work the most.

True - but then eventually, everyone would have to focus on the hard/hairy parts, no?

Yup. That doesn't mean that it's not worth taking care of the easy bits first.

Most likely support for obscure devices would disappear.

To be fair, that's already starting to happen[0]. do you think it would happen faster than it is today?

0. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI0OTg

And in this way you end up with 0 regulations, which I assume we are supposed to consider a feature, not a bug?

One regulation, at least you'd still have that.

It's nonsense. Measure regulatory burden by number of rules is absolutely arbitrary.

This document contradicts that every other sentence after that. Almost all the bills he proposes are regulations, the executive orders... regulations. He proposes to overturn about a quarter as many things as he wants made law or executive order.