President Trump tagged an important executive order to the temporary travel ban. It is not getting much play, but it ought to because it is more sweeping in its reach.

Forget-the-temporary-travel-ban-trump-has-issued-a-really-important-order. From PowerLine: President Trump signed an order Monday aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate at least two regulations for each new one.

The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses.

The Democrats and their lapdogs are not happy and had this to say: But experts on government policy said Trump’s formulation made little sense. William Gale, a tax and fiscal policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said “the number of regulations is not the key. It’s how onerous regulations are. This seems like a totally nonsensical constraint to me.”

There are millions of regulations out there. I guarantee that if one searches hard enough, regulations that govern long dead industries, occupations and products can be found still in force. Just the cost of printing the regulations is probably outrageous. Consider that we live in a bureaucratic state, I would suspect that there exists in sub-basements all around Washington D.C. units in every agency with regulatory power, which has analysts that faithfully report the application of regulations under their dominion. Nobody asks, and nobody reports how many regulations were not applied or when these dormant regulations were last employed.

Brooklings Institution’s Mr. Gale misses the point. If a regulation is unused, underused or not applied because of inherent flaws why does it exist? Such a regulation builds contempt for the whole system of regulations.

Part of the reason that bad, obsolete, unused and underused regulations exist is that it would take an effort on the part of the bureaucracy to cull the herd. In a numbers game, the only thing that matters is quantity, not quality.

The twofer action suggested by the President may seem arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than the regulations he is trying to curtail. As a first step, it breaks the logjam of inactivity dealing with obsolete regulations, unused and underused regulations.