The incoming administration and Congress will make decisions over the first half of 2025 in five key economic policy domains: tariffs and trade, industrial and innovation policy, business regulation, the national debt, and tax reform. Here’s our take:
Regulatory policy must balance promoting innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic efficiency with protecting values like consumer safety, privacy, and the environment. The Trump Administration should do this by taking lighter-touch approach to regulation than the Biden Administration has done.
The Trump Administration and Congress will face many consequential regulatory decisions immediately after taking office:
- How aggressively to pursue pharmaceutical price control, a key component of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act
- How to view mergers and acquisitions after the Biden Administration’s stark shift away from the consumer welfare standard informed antitrust policy
- How to think about oil and gas-based energy project permitting
- How to regulate AI
Our thoughts:
- Why it matters: Getting the balance right is vital for economic growth, opportunity, and human well-being.
- Our take: The new administration should abandon the Inflation Reduction Act’s price control regime to foster health care innovation, reinstate the consumer welfare standard as the basis for antitrust policy, reform permitting processes to support energy abundance as well as long-term transition to renewable sources, and regulate AI only through narrowly tailored measures aimed at well-defined potential harms.
