Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

19. Department of Transportation · Notable

Revive the Trump-era “rule on rules” regulation (RIN 2105-AE84)

Done

622 19. Department of Transportation

“DOT would also reduce unnecessary burdens by returning to the Trump Administration’s “rule on rules” approach to regulations, implemented in late 2019 as RIN 2105-AE84. … The Biden Administration unwisely moved away from this reform, and the next Administration should revive it without delay.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    DOT issued the final rule, effective 2026-05-27, reinstating and expanding the 2019 procedural reforms across 49 CFR parts 1, 5 and 7, 14 CFR parts 300, 302 and 399, and the corresponding PHMSA, FMCSA, NHTSA and FTA parts. The preamble states that the 2021 rescission responded to two executive orders the President revoked in EO 14148, and that the Department has reconsidered its 2021 justifications. The rule adds procedures the 2019 version did not have, including an express right for regulated parties to enforce its protections through administrative proceedings.

  2. Attempted

    DOT proposed to reinstate the rulemaking, guidance and enforcement procedures that the Department had rescinded by final rule on 2021-04-02 — the reforms the Quote calls the "rule on rules". The NPRM carries RIN 2105-AF32 rather than the Mandate's RIN 2105-AE84: the RIN is new because the action is a new rulemaking, but its stated object is the same 49 CFR part 5 procedures adopted in late 2019.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The RIN in the Quote is not the RIN of the instrument. A search for 2105-AE84 returns nothing in the window; the reinstatement runs under RIN 2105-AF32, docket DOT-OST-2025-0007. This is playbook §1.1’s “programme names drift” in its cleanest form — the object is identified by what the rule does (reinstating the procedures rescinded by the 2021-04-02 final rule, 86 FR 17292), which both the NPRM and the final rule say in their first sentence.
  • done rather than partial: the named object — the 2019 “rule on rules” procedures — is back in the CFR and in force. The final rule is broader than the 2019 original, which the note records; a wider restoration still satisfies a restoration ask.
  • The same final rule underpins DOT’s separate aviation-consumer procedural restoration (#1725); its preamble is cited there for the Department’s general policy against reliance on informal guidance.
Action
reinstate
Object
DOT “rule on rules” regulation, RIN 2105-AE84
ID
1709