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President Trump revoked a Biden-era executive order that spurred more aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws in an effort to promote competition in the economy.
In an executive order signed Wednesday, Mr. Trump revoked former President Biden’s July 2021 order targeting anticompetitive practices in tech, health care, agriculture and other areas of the economy.
The Biden administration order was sweeping — it included over 70 actions and recommendations that the Democratic president said would lower prices, increase wages, and help the economy grow.
The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department said in a statement that it “salutes” Mr. Trump’s decision to revoke the order.
“America First Antitrust focuses on empowering the American people in the free markets, not enabling regulators and bureaucrats to prescribe outcomes,” said Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
“We are unleashing the new American Golden Age through antitrust enforcement that removes barriers to innovation and opportunity and limits regulatory burdens on free competition,” she said.
The division said it “commends the Administration for promoting competition via tailored executive orders that call for lowering drug prices and opening regulatory barriers to competition.”
In another order Wednesday, the president aimed to “streamline regulations and foster a competitive commercial space industry.”
It calls for environmental reviews for launch and reentry licenses, permits and vehicles to be eliminated or expedited and for regulations to be reviewed for duplicates.
It also calls for a review of whether states are hindering spaceport infrastructure development, according to the fact sheet of the order.
The order mandates a streamlined process for authorizing novel space activities and establishes a position in the Department of Transportation to focus on innovation and deregulation in the industry. It also calls for an associate administrator for commercial space transportation to be appointed in the Federal Aviation Administration to create regulatory reform.
“It is imperative that new space-based industries, space exploration capabilities, and cutting-edge defense systems are pioneered in America rather than by our adversaries,” said the White House fact sheet accompanying the order.
Transportation Secretary and Action NASA Administrator Sean Duffy celebrated the order, saying that “by slashing red tape tying up spaceport construction, streamlining launch licenses so they can occur at scale, and creating high-level space positions in government, we can unleash the next wave of innovation.”
A third order calls for the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve to be filled with critical drug components, to ensure the U.S. has enough essential medicines.
“Restoring capacity for domestic production of essential pharmaceutical products is essential to safeguarding national health and security against global supply chain disruptions,” the White House fact sheet said.
The order calls for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the Department of Health and Human Services to determine a list of the roughly 26 vital drugs and 86 essential medicines and obtain a six-month supply of them, with an emphasis on those domestically-manufactured.
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